Athlon MPs?

[Keith J]

I am in the market for POWER...not graphics or any cool stuff, just raw number crunching, matrix solving POWER. I found a capable system board from Tyan (www.tyan.com) in their Tiger with the AMD 760MPX chipset. This is a twin processor board utilizing the AMD Athlon MP up to 2400 MHz speeds for performance specs surpassing most of the top Intel chips.

The limitation of this speed is both the OS and application must be multiprocessor compiled (I'm using ANSYS running under NT/2k) in order for the second processor to be of any benefit. All other software runs on just one of the two processors.

Anyone here with MP experience? BTW, they also make great servers. Mine uses the top line SCSI 320 hard drive and a nVidia Quarda 4 750 XGL video processor. 4 GB of registered DDR memory. Yes, its a DIY system...but since its my money maker, its a goldmine. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/computer2.gif

[DoctorDoom]

Don't know anything about it, but...

From AMD:

AMD Athlon™ MP Processor (http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInformation/0,,30_118_809,00.html)

From AnandTech:

AMD's Athlon MP 2100+ vs. Intel's Xeon 2.4GHz - Database Server Comparison (http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.html?i=1641)

From CPU Scorecard:

AMD Athlon MP (http://www.cpuscorecard.com/cpuprices/aamp.htm)

From CPUReview:

AMD "Smart MP" Introduction, Analysis, Review and Q&A (http://www.cpureview.com/rev_amdmp_a.html)

From The Tech Report:

AMD Athlon MP 1900+ processor (http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/2001q4/athlonmp-1900/index.x?pg=1)

And, for the "Gee whiz!" crowd, from Supercomputing Online:

RackSaver Builds a 264 AMD Athlon MP Processor Supercomputer for UC Santa Cruz (http://www.supercomputingonline.com/article.php?sid=1481)

[ QUOTE ]
The Supercomputer consists of 132 Linux based nodes configured with 264 AMD Athlon(TM) MP processors, 132 gigabytes of memory and nearly 8 terabytes of storage.

[/ QUOTE ]

[Rhino]

I've seen a couple of reviews that really liked the Athlon for multiprocessing.

Is this going to be a retrofit for an existing NT/2K system? It's an absolute nightmare converting an existing NT installation on an NTFS drive to multiprocessor from single processor (I speak from experience). I can't say for sure, but I think it is similarly difficult for 2K. If NT is originally installed with the multiprocessor kernel though, it works great.

[Keith J]

I am only saving data I created...that is on the external drive...I want to change partition sizes and will just trash the existing data.