Slashdot Mirror
Paint Yourself An Athlon MP
SNIa asks: "How many people are checking the prices of AMD chips after seeing this?" and points out this article at HardwareZone.com about modifying Athlon XP processors to perform like MPs. No guarantees, except a voided warranty.
They knew someone would figure it out. I guess they just want to keep people like business users (the main consumers of dual processor machines), spending money on AthlonMPs, because no sane admin would put clandestinly (is that a word?) modded chips into production.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
that they would have this capability, although disabled. I mean they just cripple the chip so that they can get more cash out of the MP versions, smart move unless you wan't another fiasco like the celeron/pentium II.
:)
The bottom line is that only a few hobbiests and nerds are going to go to this length to get it working, certainly not many businesses are going to accept this. So AMD makes it difficult enough so that you can't do it at the flick of a switch, but you can with a little guts (and silver paint). Seems like a win/win situation to me.
Also don't forget it may be easier just to use a couple of Durons to accomplish this task, dirt cheap too
He who defends everything, defends nothing. -- Fredrick The Great
While serving the purpose of locking the cpu for ordinary people, these small bridges on top of the cpus have attracted all the HW geeks which have unlocked, overclocked, underclocked (to get a quiter system)these cpus.
One of the biggest strength in the Athlon line (in my opinion) is that AMD have been able to sell locked cpus to 90% of the population but have made it possible for the last 10% to overclock these cpus. They have won both the normal consumers and the techfreaks in that respect.
.... ofcourse it also helps that their cpus are affordable and that there are plenty of them!
Thomas S. Iversen
.. of people who paint up thier cps to pretend to be "other" cpu's. not my style.
If you fucking people keep penny-pinching AMD it will go out of business. Then bend over because all you'll have left are $800 Intel P4's rammed up your ass with the next new proprietary crap memory system and yet-another new CPU interface to kill off competition. FUCK INTEL. LONG LIVE AMD!
Somehow I don't think so. It might not work right, it might crash, but burn? Umm, how exactly is that going to happen? As for protecting your job - perhaps posting in something other than your actual name? You didn't actually use your name for your account did you?
;)
Seriously, I'm not trying to flame but claims that it will burn in a month or so sound awfully thin. Your going to have to either explain it a little better or point to some evidence of this occuring somewhere. Guess we'll know "in a month or so" one way or the other huh? BTW - all those neato' hacks made it into the Duron but not the XP?!
One thing the article did NOT give and that I hope the next one will is BENCHMARKS. On the off chance that this guy isn't trolling benchmarks ought to tell us if both CPUs are actually being used by the OS and if those "hacks" are actually for real. Compare it to SMP Durons for instance - is it much faster? I'd also be interested in hearing more about what SMP MBs work best - I nearly bought the Tyan this weekend
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
It's not like you're overclocking the system - if the core logically supports being run in an MP configuration, there is no reason why there should be problems otherwise.
However, if the processor didn't actually support MP (doesn't apply in this case), you are guaranteed to have problems. But those problems should be quite severe (cache coherency problems? IPIs don't work? It'll never even boot successfully).
There is nothing physically special about an MP configuration, so unless the modification does something else as well as identify the processor as MP-capable, it shouldn't be dangerous.
IC speed is generally a part selection - all the parts are made the same, then tested and sorted by how fast they'll go. The slowest gate on the chip determines the speed limit. That's why testing matters; you may have 20 million gates that work at a high speed, and one that doesn't.
AMD's own CPU price list is interesting. The fastest MP is the 2000+, while the fastest XP is the 2100. Does this indicate a speed penalty for enabling multiprocessor mode? It may.
The faster processors cost far more than the slower ones, and it's unlikely that they really have a severe yield problem that requires this. It's unusual today for a fab to produce large numbers of substandard parts. Today, yields below 80% indicate serious problems in the fab. Some fabs report 99.5% yields. A decade ago, variability in the fab was much higher; a whole range of speeds came out, along with a sizable percentage of rejects. Today, the processes are much more uniform.
(Think about what this means. Sizable wafers are being produced with almost all the atoms where the design says they're supposed to be. That's an achievement. And then these bozos slap conductive paint on the pins and think they've done something cool.)
According to today's Pricewatch, the difference between an Athlon 1800 XP and an Athlon 1800 MP is $68.
If you're like me, and you keep your computers forever, what's $136 over a 3-year lifetime when you can be assured of reliable operation? (OK, it's $3.78 a month for fewer crashes).