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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. :)
"Sorry kids, no Christmas presents this year... Daddy's gonna buy a dual Athlon!" ;-)
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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.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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.
The great megahertz myth...
See http://www.apple.com/g4/myth/ for a simple explination that hertz is not everything...
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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Oh come on... "heat issues"? Yeah, it smokes if you rip off the heatsink, what a surprise...
OK, it's very fast. That's nice. How reliable and compatible is the system? Those are my top priorities, esp. for a server. How well does it run with some random version of Linux or *BSD?
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Psychologically it's a good move for AMD. Even though I know that their 1600MHz chip is faster than Intel's 1900MHz chip (or equivalent) I would still feel a bit, disempowered ... groan. And for those who do not know they are surely going to be suckered into Intel's super MHz sales pitch.
Ya gotta roll with the punches ...
:wq
FLOPS is just as bad; it only measures FPU performance, so it's only remotely accurate for math intensive apps; also, just as for CPU speed, it totally ignores how much work you actually accomplish during a cycle. We might as well go with BOGOMips - at least we know those aren't accurate...
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I want to see tom's Hardware do an expose on the space shuttle and take off the heat shield during re-entry. That is something that I'm sure worries the astronauts to death.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
... dare I commit a computer junkie sin, and ask what is *truly* the point in running dual processors, if when you are already running a decent (1 gig +) board and chipset... the difference is only in a few seconds? I haven't been using *nix systems for very long (I just started running Debian recently) but the first thing I noticed after switching from windows was that the sheer processing power from my 1 gig chipset (with my measly 128 ram) is already fast enough that compiling the kernel isn't a long wait at all... I'm almost afraid to know how fast it would have compiled if I had been running a dual chipset.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'd *love* to be able to use numerous copies of photoshop (if I had windows and if the version of windows I had been using even used both chips... afaik win 98 would get real cranky about 2 processing chips and just use the one), but I've never had the oppurtunity to put that to the test because I've never been able to afford a dual chipset. (so if you know how windows does with dual processors, I'd be delighted to find out.)
One thing I am wondering though, is during the test, they used the Duron chips verses the athlons... its downright obvious which chipsets going to win... If i am not mistaken, the Duron was AMD's reply to the Celeron... a "cheap" chip that lacks as much sheer power as the Athlons. (And if I'm not mistaken, the Duron gives the Celeron a good run for its money).
Now if I had the spare... howver much money it would cost for the chips and board (and some newram to go with it) I would probably buy it in a heartbeat, though I don't know what good it would *really* do a computer user like me... the most cpu intensive program I use is the gimp. (One thing I miss about windows is ps6.0...*sigh*)
What I would like to see is tests of the athlon verses intels latest prize... that would be a competition worth snickering at. I'd like to see intel get blown out of the water.
-- RJ
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.
Would the cache-less version of your proposed BI be the "Athlon BI-curious"
ho ho ho
I figure it would be pretty useful for running something like Slashdot.
;).
:( ). That's far from slashdot loads (>>60hits/s).
;).
Or for running something that's being slashdotted
For instance I've webapps that do about 30 pages/sec on a single processor PIII-550 (db+app on same server
So if the load ever goes up, a Athlon MP 1800+ and 266MHz DDR RAM server would come in handy
Definitely be useful for servers. I'll need to be reassured about thermal safety because our airconditioning isn't comfortably reliable. That said, AMD seems to be moving in the right directions, and it shouldn't be a big worry.
DB servers with Gigs of DDR RAM will kick ass. When you can do full table scans at 266MHz, who cares about the huge second level caches Sun boasts about.
Cheerio,
Link.
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.
Wrong. Intel archetected their entire P4 line around having higher clock speeds in order to fool the public. This isn't a rumor, I worked there at the time.
They realized that when someone went to buy a computer, performance didn't matter as much as a big number. Consumers think a P3 running at 800mhz is much faster than a P3 running at 700mhz, and don't even consider stuff like video card, memory, and disk speed, much less differences in chip archetectures.
I mean, there's a reason why P4s performed so bad. Its not like they were all done making them and realized "Oh no! This thing isn't performing that well! Its barely better than a P3!" they knew it as they started to design it.
_AMD_ realized that they couldn't win the numbers battle, and renamed their chips to compensate. I hope it works better than when Cyrix did it.
Since when does Joe Public compare chips of different architectures? The naming convention is used by the non-computer literate, because traditionally it's been accurate; if you had a Pentium 233, and got a Pentium 333, it was faster. Seemed to work just then. Of course adding Athlons screwed it up a little, but it's still a good, general rule-of-thumb for comparing chip generations.
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.
It didn't help matters that Apple computers aren't really that fast; don't get me wrong, I own a mac and I love it, but the PPC just doesn't outclass x86s like Apple claims, at least in real-world applications.
True; the "400Mhz G4 beats 800Mhz Pentium" tests all depended on vectorized assembly stuff, but I don't think there's a benchmark at which a G4 wouldn't have blown away an Intel chip at the same clock speed. I suppose that's part of the problem: "Our computers are slower than theirs, but not nearly as much as you'd think!" isn't a great marketing gimmick.