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+

[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: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.