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: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.