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.

Comments

Perfornance Reports??

[tapiwa]

This is taking overclocking to the next level. The kind of people who do this sort of thing have always had the "warranty voided" hanging over their heads.....

What I would be keen on is for someone who has done this to tell us how stable their machine is.

I am yet to read a article on overclocking etc that does not say that some users have experienced problems... ... I think tech writers use this spiel instead of the less friendly "we are not going to be held responsible if you fsck up"

This proves little.

[Niadh]

The article never got out of POST... It's a nice though that just because you fooled the motherboard into thinking the CPU's have MP support they really do. This article proves nothing to me. Not until I see some *nix (or NT I guess) boot up and utilize both CPU's I'll just assume it's wishful thinking. Like setting your 500MHz celeron to 3 GHz and watching it post for about 3 seconds right before the chip burns :p

Can anyone link to a better site? one that does actual so it working?

Re:Time to retire the Athlon 750

[Mr Windows]

What would be really cool is if you had clear tubes and a special die in the water that changed colors by temperature

The Cray 2 had a fancy see-through waterfall cooling unit, you can see a picture at Cray's site too. The cooling liquid is fluorinert, which (IIRC) is used as a substitute for human plasma in surgery. The whole circuitry is immersed in the liquid (which is non-conductive); there's non of the heatsink and radiator business that happens with watercooled CPUs.

Every now and then a used Cray turns up on Ebay, so it might be worth a look. It'd save on heating bills, and make a good conversation piece, too!

Re:i need to know one thing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Better question: does dual-cpu justify an 80 to 100+ dollar increase in price? If so, buy it. If not, don't. The market will determine the price - econ 101.

I'm not touching it!

[mnordstr]

The last thing you want to do is play around with your XPs! They are the most fragile pices of anything I've ever seen. If you however decide to play around with them, remember that the processor die is like a small ant, put a little pressure on it and it will die. One has to be really careful when attaching the heat sink. And never ever try to run it even for a fraction of a second without a heat sink and a fan, it will die immediately, probably destroying your motherboard.

Let this be a warning!
Be careful when playing around with an Athlon XP!

What's the diff?

[BLKMGK]

If the XP and MP cores are the same then what exactly is the difference? The BIOS says XP instead of MP? AMD maybe did some testing? Perhaps the cut trace is the result of a failed test? Or more likely a marketing gimmick like the locked multipliers onthe Intel CPUs? "Hey Bernie, we're out of 500mhz CPUs could ya' downgrade some of the 1gig units?" As yield increases on established CPU lines this really does happen if there's a shortage of slower CPUs. I see no reason to believe that AMD isn't just as smart both with clock speeds and the SMP ability. As fast and as cheap as their CPUs are I've seen fit to go ahead and buy the higher speed units and not monkey with the multipliers but to save $80+ I'll be more than happy to mod an XP CPU's SMP jumper :-)

If AMD doesn't like this then they're going to have to be MUCH clearer about what's different even if it's just to say that it's added testing involved. It's not like the CPUs come with a report card telling you what failed and what didn't ;-)

Benchmarks man, we need benchmarks and lot's of them. I'm sure it won't be long before Annand, HardOCP, or heaven forbid Tom's (gak) get onboard with this and benchmark us to death. :-)

Re:What's the diff?

[saider]

If I recall, microprocessors for a given line are all produced using the same process. Because the process is not exact, each microprocessor has slight variations from the one next to it. These variations have an impact on performance.

These variations are typically the reason for different clock speeds. The more variations there are and the farther they are from the spec, the less likely the component will work as designed. However, by slowing down the clock, you can get the component to work reliably. Also, microprocessors have redundant components in their design so that if one is not fabricated properly, the microcode will use one of the redundant blocks.

Simply put, AMD doesn't say they will build 700 XP 1400s and 300 MP 1400s. Rather they schedule a production run on a given line for 1000 chips knowing that about 30% of the chips will be suitable for multiprocessor use. If there is only demand for 100 MPs, then they will simply label 200 of the chips that passed the MP test as XP in order to satisfy the demand. The chips that came out perfectly are the high clock speed/large feature count chips. If features fail or the chip cannot work at a given clock speed, the requirements are dropped to a lower level and the processor is labelled as such. Also not that as time goes on and the process is refined, more "perfect chips" are made and so more chips of a higher clock speed can be made. This is why processors start life with a slow clock and slowly get better as the manufacturing process is tweaked.

So, when you put a XP into a MP system, you are taking some chances.

1) Your chip is simply a relabelled MP that works fine in both roles and was relabelled to meet XP demand.

2) Your chip is a failed MP that was labelled as XP because not all the MP parts work right.

Either way, you have little to loose by trying it as an MP. I would use a reversible techique, such as soldering copper foil to the pads, so that the mod can be undone if the processor is a #2.

The reason that AMD does not publicly say this is that it is very difficult to explain this to the average, or even technically inclined Joe and they get little benefit from doing so. It would be a disaster if AMD said to TechieJoe that MP and XP were the same thing and said to AOLJoe that MP and XP are different. Just stick to the story that the processors are different, because they usually are.

Re:What's the diff?

[Saurentine]

Simply put, AMD doesn't say they will build 700 XP 1400s and 300 MP 1400s. Rather they schedule a production run on a given line for 1000 chips knowing that about 30% of the chips will be suitable for multiprocessor use. If there is only demand for 100 MPs, then they will simply label 200 of the chips that passed the MP test as XP in order to satisfy the demand.

This was the case with Intel 486DX and SX processors, but there is no evidence (not even anecdotal) that AMD does MP/XP selection in this manner. Why not? AMD has been getting great processor yields lately. They'd probably only save a few chips per thousand from the dustbin that could have been XP. And because they're not the leading company in the market, it's better to toss the chips that fail the MP test in case there's a further flaw that economical high speed testing won't detect.

Intel did the 486 SX/DX thing mainly because of tremendously large demand for processors that commanded $395-$1000 each. Sure, they kept doing it later as a convenience, but it was the high demand/high price/low yield situation that led them to do it in the first place.

Frankly, I would have been shocked if someone said there was a real difference in the cores (even before this revelation; it's the packaging where the differentiation is made), and I'd be incredulous if they were grading out reject MPs as XPs. There just isn't enough incentive to do so.

Does it come up as an MP?

[BLKMGK]

Or does it still post as an XP? If it comes up as an MP then this is all the more telling IMO. I think this is a great hack and as soon as SMP AMD boards become a little more common I predict we'll see lot's of SMP AMD systems running around.

I've just about flushed all of the Intel systems off my home network and replaced them with AMD. A couple of old dualie Celeron are left but if the AMD stuff gets cheap enough those will go too. Sorry Intel but you guys have pissed me off with this PIV crap, the locked multipliers, RAMBUS, and the mods you hacked into the Celeron to prevent SMP operation. AMD is doing the enthusiest right as well as the consumer with their pricing. Go AMD!

Re:Don't try this at home

[ThaReetLad]

I'm not sure about this. I have an athlon XP 1700+, but if I ask my BIOS (Epox 8KHA+) whether the chip is MP capable or not, it replies "it is" and POST now says Athlon MP 1700+. I have never seen an Athlon MP 1700+ advertised so I must assume that many of the XP chips out there are MP capable, just like many chips can run much faster than the number printed on it says.

Re:spoiler ....

[ackthpt]

Good question.

I'm in the midst of building a dual CPU system and was interested to see reports of Durons and Athlon XP's running in dual motherboards. Certainly the builders think they are getting something like MP performance. Seems to me that successfully getting two CPU's to run on an Asus A7M266-D, Tyan S2466N or MSI K7D isn't necessarily the same as having two MP. I'd like to see benchmarks showing a negligible performance difference. All that money to get there, I wonder why some still try to skimp a few bucks.

IMHO it's not too unlike hotrodders, many of whom knew tricks to get more power out of cars, but at what cost, i.e. stinky exhaust, short lived engine, failure to pass smog (in CA) Not quite the depth of knowledge, but lots of creative guessing.

If painting, the stuff to use is in little bottles, sold at automotive stores, used to repair reat window defrosters.

Not a smart move....

[Anonymous Coward]

This move will NOT make AMD more money.

The real source of MP chip sales is definitely system vendors, OEMs, etc., bigger organizations relying business on their "guarantee of MP operation", and can't take risk on individual chips; of course you might add the occasional enthusiast with more cash to throw into his/her system.

For normal individuals, however, SMP itself will probably not be enough to make them automatically buy such systems; with a highly probable chance that "normal" XPs could do the same, the scenario is entirely different...

For every such dual-XP system sold, AMD sells 1 extra XP processor, plus a sale of an AMD chipset motherboard. That's grabbing business from VIA, and together with the extra processor, are all sales that would NOT have gone to AMD on AthlonMPs

That's just my theory though....