What exactly is the Athlon MP?

[Shooters]

Okay, I've been seeing a lot of talk about the Athlon MP for the past week or so and I'm a little confused about it.

First, is the Athlon MP the same thing as the Palomino? I didn't think desktop Palominos were going to be available until later this year or early next year, but I've seen some people in the forums as well as dealers on Pricewatch refer to this chip as the Palomino.

Also, I'm under the assumption that the Athlon MP is the multi proc version of the current Athlon/Thunderbird. Is this right? If this is the case, then why are some people flocking to this chip? Is there something special about it that allows it to perform better in a single proc setup than current Tbirds?

Thanks,
Shooters

 

[AmdEmAll]

The Athlon MP is a Palomino but it is optimized for servers. I'm not sure exactly what is different but I remember reading that it is different then the regular Palomino that will be out in August.

 

[Shooters]

So, you're saying that it's kind of like the Xeon of AMD processors?

 

[bozo1]

Not really. The Xeon's are available with different sizes of L2 Cache and are scalable to more then 2 processors. The AMD760MP chipset will support dual Athlon MP processors (same cache size as the standard Athlons). Regular Athlon processors work fine but AMD only officially supports it with the MP flavor.

Check out this.

 

[ElFenix]

the only difference is that one says athlonMP outside and the the other says athlon 4.

 

[bozo1]

that's kinda rude... plugging a different name on the same thing.

 

[AmdEmAll]

There was an article I think on anantech about how the AthlonMP is different then the Palomino, it did better in certain test that are server dependent, anyone read about that or am I loosing my mind. You would think AMD would change something in it to make it better at serving.

 

[Shooters]

Thanks for the link bozo. I've seen that article there for like the past week but just haven't gotten around to reading it yet. I guess I should.

 

[bozo1]

Just a thought but I wonder if the chips they are labeling MP are from the same batch or something. Years ago when doing a dual or better PPro, you pretty much had to get processors at the same stepping level or you were asking for trouble. I ponder...

 

[JRock]

I was under the impression that ATHLON 4 was Just the CPU in general. And that the MP was either Moble Processing as in Laptops or Multi Processor. Toms says there are like 3 or 4 versions of the cpu commin out. Server, Desktop, and Laptop and i believe.

 

[johneetrash]

<< Thanks for the link bozo. >>



man when i first saw that i was like &quot;man that was mean&quot; then i saw his name

 

[Courtland]

I think they pick the top of the crop chips for the MPs, at least I would think so, which is alos one reason they started with 1.2ghz, for stability. And as far as I know there is no difference, even the thunderbirds theoreticaly support smp.