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

Sweet...

[NightWhistler]

"Sorry kids, no Christmas presents this year... Daddy's gonna buy a dual Athlon!" ;-)

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:smokin!

[linzeal]

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.

Dual Processing...

[Trillian_Angel]

... 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.

Re:Dual Processing...

[mr-spam-uk]

We use dual processor machines here as WORKSTATIONS.
Sure I can't see the point if we are talking about having a DP machine at home for your personal use, but in industry time = money. The amount of time our artists spend waiting for photoshop to filter an image or our programmers have to sit and wait for a compile to run IS an issue for us. That and maybe, if they have to wait a while we'd like them to be able to get on with something else in the mean time.
I'm a programmer, I quit frequently have 2 or 3 compiles running at the same time, as I'm hooked up to test hardware downloading a buld and testing/debugging it.

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.

Really Funny Joke!

[squaretorus]

Would the cache-less version of your proposed BI be the "Athlon BI-curious"

ho ho ho

Slashdot?

[TheLink]

I figure it would be pretty useful for running something like Slashdot.

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 :( ). That's far from slashdot loads (>>60hits/s).

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.