Athlon MP Reviewed

RendEr writes "At The Tech Report, there's a review of AMD's latest multiprocessor chip, the Athlon MP 1900+. Watching this thing smoke through Linux kernel complies is a beautiful thing. Combined with AMD's new 760MPX chipset, these chips could help usher in a new era of cheap dual-processor desktop systems. "

Comments

Athlon MP

[GigsVT]

We just set up an AthlonMP 1600+ server using the Tyan Tiger board, and I have to say, Intel is going to have some serious competition in the server market.

This thing is incredible. With our RAID streaming 30-40meg/sec writes, and 100-130meg/sec reads, the Athlons barely break a sweat, sitting at 2X25% utilization, in the same situation where Dual 933 coppermine Intel chips maxed out at 2X100%.

The main reason we hadn't gone with AMD sooner in a server is because of the lack of a 64bit PCI board that didn't require special power connectors.

The Tyan Tiger was a godsend. In all, it, two 1600+s, 1gig DDR ram and a dual 160 SCSI card cost about 25% less than the Supermicro P3TDE6, 1GB RAM, and two 933 coppermine PIIIs (on board dual SCSI).

The Tyan board does have less 64 bit PCI slots, and also doesn't support 64bit 66Mhz PCI, but we didn't have any cards that supported that either. It does have four 64bit slots, and that was enough for us.

One thing I don't understand about the Tyan is why they didn't just make all the slots 64bit PCI. It is fully forward and backward compatible.

As a former die-hard Intel guy, I have to say AMD is finally a contender in the server market.

MP 1900+ same as XP 1900+

[Phosphor3k]

The two are the exact same chip, excepting AMD's "SMP certification". So, if you want an even cheaper duel cpu solution, (without the warrenty of course) go for an 760MPX board with 2 XPs.

Re:MP 1900+ same as XP 1900+

[red_dragon]

There are some additional, albeit minor, differences between the MP and XP; IIRC, the MP's hardware data prefetch is optimised for SMP configurations. You can put any Athlon on a 760MP(x) board (even a Duron), but the MP will be a bit faster because of this. However, beyond this, yes, they're pretty much identical.

Re:MP 1900+ same as XP 1900+

[Chaostrophy]

Not the same!

They have a few treaks for better memory performance in multi processor situations, have a look at the http://www.anandtech.com/ benchmarks. They do not seem to have benifit in single cpu systems.

Yes, unlike Intel, AMDs multi cpu version of their chip has real design differences, not pinout and cache changes.

Of course, all socket A chips are good for SMP use.

Re:Is it me?

[stoffel]

The great megahertz myth...

See http://www.apple.com/g4/myth/ for a simple explination that hertz is not everything...

Re:Uses

[Anonymous Coward]

Quake 3 engine uses SMP where it can, so that means all q3 powered games (like RTCW) will benefit from SMP.

Compilations will obviously benefit too since they can be nicely multi-threaded, any high and GFX/3d software will make use of it.

i personally have recently bought a dual MP 1.2ghz (the second CPU arrived yesterday, not installed it yet) with tyan tiger MP mobo, mainly for SMP research etc

and the mobo looks so cool with 2 CPU fans on it too ;)

Re:Reliability & Compatibility

[zsazsa]

How reliable and compatible is the system?

Given proper cooling - very reliable. The thermal diode in the MP/XP line improves this reliability even more. (Which brings up the question - do these boards fully support the diode?)

How well does it run with some random version of Linux or *BSD?

Perfectly.
The onboard stuff on the Tyan boards is quite standard: Adaptec AIC7xxx SCSI, 3com 3c59x Ehernet.

Ian

Memory

[Anonymous Coward]

For those with large memory requirements, the Athlon MP using the Tyan boards can only go up to 3.5 GB of RAM (reliably, that is ... there are memory corruption issues with 4 GB), whereas both the Tualatin and Xeon have motherboards that can take 4 GB of RAM. Right now, this is the only thing that is a disadvantage for the Athlon systems (and the only thing that precludes my company from wholeheartedly jumping onto the Ahtlon bandwagon). As noted in the article, memory for Xeon systems is quite expensive, making a fully populated Xeon system significantly more expensive than an Athlon or Tualatin system.

MP / XP

[shut_up_man]

I've been looking at upgrading to dual Athlons for the last while, and was considering running XPs in one of the new MPX motherboards, rather than paying extra for the MP Athlons. Everything I'd read pointed at them working just as well, so way pay more?

Then I see in the Bapco Sysmark test that the dual Duron setup hung in the same place each time - this is the first real evidence I've seen that running non-MP CPUs might be a bad idea... good to know.

Re:Reliability & Compatibility

[LordNimon]

It's not very stable for me. I can't get it to run cpuburn for more than 10 minutes before hanging, and this is with just dual Athlon 1.2s on a Tiger. A friend of mine had the same board running 1.8's, and he had to return it because it wouldn't last more than a week before locking up.

Re:What about motherboards?

[hattig]

ASUS, MSI, EPoX, etc are all releasing 760MPX based motherboards within the month. These will all have 2 64-bit/66MHz PCI slots and 3/4 standard PCI slots. Some will have network on-board. Some will have 6-channel CMedia audio. Some will have ATA-RAID. Some might even have SCSI. All will support 4GB registered DDR memory, or 2GB unregistered DDR.

There are plenty of places that have listed these - TomsHardware, XBitLabs, AMDZone, HardOCP, etc etc.

Re:Reliability & Compatibility

[whovian]

I haven't yet gotten around to trying it, but this user seems to have had some success.

Text:

From: otheos (otheos.at@clara.net)
Subject: Re: TigerMP (2460) and lm_sensors, anybody care?
Newsgroups: alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.tyan
View: Complete Thread (5 articles) | Original Format
Date: 2001-12-05 17:43:47 PST

Was not very simple but finally got it.

You need:
/sbin/modprobe i2c-dev
/sbin/modprobe i2c-amd756
/sbin/modprobe w83781d init=0

Make sure you use init=0 otherwise the system will freeze. Also getting the
new lm_sensors from the CVS and patching/recompiling the kernel works
better (didn't mention anything though).

Now when you run sensors you'll get 77C for the CPU's. but if you change
the sensor type at /etc/sensors.conf under the:

chip "w83782d-*" "w83783s-*" "w83627hf-*"

#like this:

set sensor1 2
set sensor2 2
set sensor3 2

and then run sensors -s (to read the changes) and then sensors again,
you'll see all fans and CPU temps + the Northbridge readings. Voltages are
more complex (apart for CPUs) as the calculation method needs tuning.

PCI-64 is not PCI-32 Compatible

[Cadderly]

I don't think that the PCI64 slots are compatible with standard PCI cards... look at this picture of a MSI board: MSI as you can see the polarity lock is reversed on the PCI-64 slots.