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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. "
AMD, Intel and Sun have all reached the conclusion that 'Mhz don't matter'. As a measure of processor speed it's only of a little relevance. The UltraSPARC III+ at 1015 Mhz is going to hit benchmarks comparable to a 2Ghs P4. Got to wonder about 'Athlon XP' though. I mean, did Windows beat them to it? And couldn't they think of anything less of an 'XP' cache (sic) in? Athlon RF (really fast). Athlon BI (Better than Intel). Athlon Turbo. :)
It's all marketing, though. Everyone knows that although AMD deny it, the XP nomenclature is a direct cash-in on Windows. And you're right, all processor manufacturers know that MHz are not a good way to compare chips with different architectures, but despite being told this over and over, Joe Public seems to be swayed by the big numbers. That is why Intel put so much effort into making high MHz over all else, and AMD are (effectively) lying about their MHz.
This is also why IIRC AMD will not approve any bios that lists the true speed of an AMD XP chip.
Apart from really fast kernel compiles and stuff like that, what's the benefit of such a machine? Messing around with the usual windows stuff, my AMD K6-450 is about as good as my friend's Intel P4. When it comes to playaing a game at the same time as an MP3, I can see where the MP becomes useful, but as far as I'm aware not many games are written to take advantage of multiprocessor, and although Windows supports it now, it doesn't make best use of it going by reviews I've seen in the past (the one I'm thinking of was mentioned earlies this week, but I can't remember the article title - it showed the MP being 7% faster under an mpeg decode and game playing benchmark test). Lets hope the Althon MP encourages people to write code that is suited to a multiprocessor environment.
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Mine lists the true speed(Tiger MP).
Actually, I'm not sure if it lists it on bootup. But it definitely lists it in the BIOS Setup screen.
- Free tabletop fantasy gaming! Grey Lotus
I've heard there are 760MPX boards coming out (with 66 MHz support for the 64-bit PCI slots; is there anything else?) but I haven't seen any yet. Anyone see any non-sketchy details anywhere? The timing I've read about was mid-November. Anand Tech probably had the best article with pictures of some boards. Here's a link to his Preview from Comdex.
A lot of posts have been asking what the point of MP boards are. I can tell you that MP boards run a/v editing programs a hell of a lot faster than single boards.
This ties in to my desire to get rid of my stupid windows box forever. Has anyone out there tried setting one of these up to do audio or video in linux? If so, I'd love to hear about it, becuase this seems to me to be the last frontier as far as home user linux apps.
Disclaimer: MINAA (Mummy! I'm Not An Animal!)
The Tiger is not overly expensive (for a Tyan), but it still almost eats up the price benefit for a dual Athlon system compared to a dual P3 one. When will someone other than the Mercedes of motherboard manufacturers release an MP-capable Athlon board?
Not that I can afford one before christmas anyway, but I'll be standing in line outside the shop immediately after newyears, and they'd better be stocked then! Orls! Heh...
How well does a system like this or a system with more than one processor (basically an SMP configuration) work with games? Assuming, of course, that the operating system is Windows 2000 or Windows XP. Linux has a few games, but the selection's not as good compared to Windows.
The reason why I'm asking is because I've heard that there are issues with games like Black & White not working correctly unless you "force" B&W to run only one processor (B&W may not be thread-safe could be a possible reason) I know other games like Quake 2 & Quake 3 Arena actually work quite well with the second processor, but doesn't "scale" to any processors than that...
Not too long ago, I seriously considered getting an SMP system like this... and decided that games probably wouldn't be too compatible with them.
I just migrated from a dual p3-800 to a single amd 1800. I regret it now. I/O is still a bitch on single CPUs, Copy a large file in the background and open another explorer window, and explorer waits. Programs load quicker, but the snappy task switching isnt there. Couple tasks using all the cpu and you feel it.
Thou on the bright side, with a gf3 ti500, im getting 100fps in tribes2 at 1024x768 with all display options set to max. 3DMark2001 actually runs in the 30+ fps in the highres demos. I dont do CAD or Modeling but so far, The cpu+gfx card
combo just tribes2 playable, its been collecting dust for a few months now.
The other way around is something that is done by Samsung. They use the AMD 760 and 750 chipset on boards for Alpha CPUs. Samsung Alpha Boards