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. :)
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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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.