Cheaper SMP AMD Motherboards?

[RNP]Venom asks: "With AMD prices as low as ever, it leaves several of my co-workers and I asking some common questions. With some 50+ Dual, Quad, etc.. Intel-based Motherboards/Chipsets, why is it we've not seen an influx of Dual-AMD equipment? I know we have at least 4 AMD Athlon cpu's sitting around the shop here that would be great to have in an SMP setup, however short of spending $200-$500 on a Tyan Product, or around the same mark for one of the few other products with dual-Athlon Support, what can one do? Where are the $50-$100 Dual-AMD CPU boards that Intel users enjoy? A Google search reveals little but Tyan and more Tyan. I thought their 'exclusive' was only 6 months? I figure the Slashdot readers would be the best to query on current or upcoming 'affordable' products in this area."

MP CPUs

[perfectlynormalbeast]

You're AMD CPUs lying around probably wouldn't work in a dual setup anyway. You need Athlon MP cpu's to work.

My view on why this hasn't taken off is that a single Athlon 2200 with DDR333 ram and other slick hardware will be nearly as fast as a dual Athlon MP2100 with DDR266 ram and cost fantastically less. The board isn't even the biggest problem. The chips themselves cost way more than their single cpu bretheren.

We have dual systems at work because we're developing server software and need dual machines to test on, but for most users they're very hard to cost/justify. I miss the old PGA celeron 366 days, when you building a dual system actually saved money.

One thing AMD could do to fight the battle with Intel would be to make all their CPUs dual capable. It's not so much a matter of cost, they just don't want to massacre their server market margins.

Re:Market interest?

[linzeal]

SMP helps games by offloading all the system tasks/drivers/network stack on one proc while you use another proc completely. I really wish they would hurry up with the physics co-procs!

Several other SMP Athlon Boards

[questionlp]

ASUS (A7M266-D) and IWill (MPX2) also make dual Athlon motherboards, though I'm not sure how much they cost. I think Abit and Gigabyte have announced if not released dual Athlon motherboards. Yes, they are not as cheap as the dual Socket 370 (or even Slot 1) motherboards on the Intel side of things, but part of the cost disparity is the complexity of the 760MP/760MPX chipset (the chipset requires two sets of traces to the two processors since the EV6 bus protocol is point-to-point rather than shared like the AGTL/GTL/GTL+ used by the Intel processors) and the 64-bit PCI slots.

I'm guessing that a lot of the dual P3 processor motherboards are only 4-layer whereas the dual Athlon boards are more likely to be 6 (or even 8) layers due to the enormous number of traces and the power comsumption required for all of the components.

BTW - You can run a dual Athlon setup with a ~430W power supply, just make sure that it is one of the AMD (or motherboard manufacturer) recommended ones and can reliably provide enough current across the necessary voltage rails.

A few non-Tyan boards

[zsazsa]

ASUS A7M266-D [asus.com.tw]
Gigabyte GA-7DPXDW [gigabyte.com.tw] and GA-7DPXDW-C [gigabyte.com.tw]
MSI K7D Master [msicomputer.com]

The problem with these boards is that they aren't really any cheaper than the Tyan boards (last I checked.) I think the reasons for the high cost are the AMD 760MP/760MPX chipset and the fact that AMD processors suck a lot more juice than the P3s and Celerons that worked on the cheapie Intel dual boards.

Ian

A listing of AMD-Duals

[grayrest]

Asus A7M266-D AMD762 DDR (AMD Dual MP) [monarchcomputer.com] -- $199

Gigabyte GA-7DPXDW AMD760 RAID DDR (AMD Dual MP) [monarchcomputer.com] -- $250

MSI K7D Master MPX AMD762 DDR (AMD Dual MP) [monarchcomputer.com] -- $205

Tyan K7 (S2462UNG) AMD760 SCSI DDR (AMD Dual MP) [monarchcomputer.com] -- $409

Tyan (S2462NG) AMD760 REG DDR (AMD Dual MP) [monarchcomputer.com] -- $305.00

...More Tyan Thunders, all over $300...

Tyan Tiger (S2466-4M) AMD760-MPX DDR (AMD Dual MP) [monarchcomputer.com] -- $209.00

Tyan Tiger (S2460) AMD760 DDR (AMD Dual MP) [monarchcomputer.com] -- $168.00

Prices and links to Monarch Computers. I was quite surprised with the prices, I thought they'd be in the $125-$150 range. I my dual AMD shopping at Monarch (built a dual MP 1600+ on a tyan tiger mobo in december for a friend), you can hit pricewatch for price comparison, but I've found Monarch to be fairly representative.

As you can see, there are quite a few motherboards on the market, you can get reviews of most of them off http://www.amdmb.com . Of all of them, I recommend the cheapest Tiger with the older 760 chipset. I know that reviewers have gotten both non-MP athlons and durons to run on the system. I'm not sure if current XP processors will work, there was talk three months ago about AMD thinking about locking out the SMP capabilities out of the XPs, but they did not do this with older versions. The main difference between the XPs and the MPs is that the MPs are certified for SMP operation, if you want a cheap and powerful server (which appears to be your goal) then you probably don't care that your chips are uncertified. The newer 760-MPX chipset (last I heard) still has isses with the southbridge's USB 2.0 and most motherboards ship with an add-in card. I can't recommend it because I'm not sure if the chipset checks for MPs or not.

Of course, YMMV.

Wrong Component

[Perdo]

So you spend 200 bucks on an MPX motherboard and 150 each for a pair of 1800mp CPUs. (2*1533mhz)

Or spend 100 bucks on a Dual Pentium III motherboard and 150 each for a pair of tulatin Pentium IIIs that are not performance comparative. (2*1133mhz)

The first Dual Pentium 4 motherboard starts at $400 and $200 each for the processors... at the same performance level that AMD provides for $500

$400 for the crappy intel.
$500 for the AMD
$800 for the good intel, that performs no better than the AMD, so you just want to pay $300 for the name.

Their absolute top end systems perform comparatively MP 2100+ vs. Intel Xeon 2.4GHz [anandtech.com]

$1400 for the Xeon, $700 for the AMD MP.

Don't forget the Rambus Tax that doubles the price of any memory you purchase for the Intel system. No, there are no DDR solutions for the Xeon yet.

Re:Where to buy?

[alienmole]

If you want quad CPU, you have to go Intel - AMD doesn't support quad. Quad systems tend to be very expensive, though (anyone who knows differently, please tell me!) You might be better off going to a server farm solution with a number of cheaper boxes, if possible.

Dual CPU systems are a pretty ordinary item these days - any reputable vendor that sells them should be fine. There, you have a choice of AMD or Intel. As the submitter of this topic points out, though, if you're specifying parts yourself (even if someone else is building them for you), at the lower end you'll find the Intel solution can be quite a bit cheaper overall, because of the low cost and wide selection of dual CPU Intel motherboards.

So if you're looking for a low cost, high performance dual CPU setup, Intel is the answer. But if you must have AMD for whatever reason, find a vendor who'll sell you something similar to the Ars Technica God Box [arstechnica.com]. The Tyan Tiger MPX motherboard is excellent.

Re:Wrong Component

[megabeck42]

>> No, there are no DDR solutions for the Xeon yet.

Actually, yes, yes there are. Of course, they are registered ECC DDR solutions, but - they are DDR.

Behold, The SuperMicro P4DP6 [supermicro.com]

There are a number of Intel E7500 based boards from Tyan and Supermicro. However, IMHO, the Rambus is a better option for the P4, which, after all, was designed for Rambus and takes a hit with SDRAM.