What Happened To SMP For AMD processors? 203
Christopher Cashell asks: "Does anyone know what is going on with AMD and support for multiple processors (SMP)? I love AMD CPU's, but I've also come to love dual processor machines. Ever since the Athlon was still an 'in progress' chip code named the K7, and AMD stated that the CPU would support SMP, I've been drooling over the idea. Now, especially, I would love to have a dual CPU Duron box. Has anyone heard anything? I couldn't find anything on AMD's site about it. As I understand it, the CPU supports SMP, so it's just a chipset issue, right? Is AMD working on a SMP chipset? And if not, are any of the other big mobo/chipset manufacturers considering it?"
Re:From what I understand... (Score:1)
It's nice as a dual P3 board, but it doesn't have the same price/performance appeal as the BP6 did with its Celerons.
Re:I'd thought 14 was the limit? (Score:1)
Any limitations on the number of CPUs is going to be in the chipset either in the number of pins (about 100/cpu) it can support, or in internal queuing stuff in the chipset keeping track of outstanding cache probes - the bus protocol itself is refreshingly free of such stuff.
The pin limitation is the main one - 14 CPUS means 1400 pins on the bridge chip - luckily the datapath can be bitsliced - by 16-bits can be done trivially due to the clocking scheme but the master chip's still going to need to be able to look at ~32 pins/cpu - so 14 cpus is still in the 500 pin realm - not a cheap solution - don't expect it for comodity K7s any time soon
But there's an important difference ... (Score:1)
Since the SMP market is relatively small (compared with the 1 CPU market) they're not going to sell a lot of these chips with the extra 100 pins - and you will pay a premium because the volumes are small.
Re:How G3/G4 is "Twice as fast" as PII (Score:1)
Re:On the way (Score:1)
The 751 was simply the south bridge to the 750 chipset, both were released over a year ago and are quite outdated now.
The 751 South-Bridge (like any other south bridge) simply runs functions like the PCI bus, IDE bus, USB, serial ports and has nothing to do with the main CPU bus, Memory Bus, or AGP bus.
The mainchipset is refered to the "North Bridge", this is the important one.
Re:Patents (Score:1)
Intel's SMP chipsets share the processor bus between them, this is why a quad Xeon isn't a powerful as you might think, because the bus can become saturated very easily which leads to starving the processor of data very easily.
Tom's hardware list for socket A SMP support (Score:1)
Actually it was AMD's problem, not nVidias (Score:1)
While Intel has fucked up, and fucked up big, that still doesn't mean that AMD is yet doing the job they should. Hopefully with the 760, they will. Plus Intel has a bonus, they have laurels to rest on. Even though the 820 and 840 are buggy peices of crap, you can still buy 440BX, GX and ZXs. Those give you ROCK solid single and dual processor performance. So even though Intel has putchered some of their latest products, they still have older ones that AMD has yet to match.
AMD (Score:1)
Re:Asymmetric Multi Processing? (Score:1)
It seems to me that buying several different speeds will be the norm as multiprocessor machines move into the mainstream. Think about it--you buy a motherboard that can take 8 processors, but you only have enough cash for 2. So you go ahead and buy the 2, confident that in 6 months you'll be able to buy 2 more for the same price, but at a much higher processor speed, and just toss them into the machine.
Incremental upgrades are a compelling benefit from the consumer's perspective, and shouldn't be dismissed.
daniel
Re:Three words: lack of demand (Score:1)
_damnit_
Re:Three words: lack of demand (Score:1)
I don't want to custom-author every piece of software I run. I just want more than one CPUs.
And I should point out that the Athlons are supposed to support SMP, and apparently chipsets will be available early next year to take advantage of that. So it seems your argument that fast and cheap preclude SMP doesn't quite hold water.
Not necessarily (Score:1)
likely to be at different memory addresses
on Alpha motherboards, with possibly some
word-size/ordering assumptions that would break
with a different ISA like x86. WRT Alphas
supporting x86 code, that's only in a limited
part of the various BIOS's that you can choose
between, not inherent to the processor or
anything else. Additionally, some peripherals
*are* alpha-native. I'd probably guess
that none of the Alpha SMP motherboards would
do the job.
Re:wtf? (Score:1)
Well, that's very interesting. Except that most of the information I've found today says that the 760MP chipset is due out in Q4 of 2000, with motherboards arriving around the same time, or very shortly thereafter.
Once again I have to thank you for going that extra mile towards making Slashdot a better place. Your 'help' towards answering a simple question is greatly appreciated.
--
Toph
Re:wtf? (Score:1)
Thanks for the URL. Most of the sites I've checked for info are more general hardware and tech sites, I don't have URLs for very many AMD specific ones.
--
Toph
OpenPIC already supported (Score:1)
OpenPIC has been supported by linux for quite a while now as it is the SMP scheme used on SMP PowerPC boards. Do a search in linux/arch/ppc for openpic.
-----------------------------------------------
Opinion/AFAIK:
in theory any CPU can be used in an SMP configuration. The reason intel's newer Celeron's don't is that Intel's APIC scheme has moved a lot of the PIC logic onto the CPU core - IRQ control logic is split between an IO-APIC on the motherboard and a PIC on the CPU core (connected by a special PIC bus. Traditionally the PIC is external to the core.
intel just disable the more advanced SMP PIC logic on Celerons. It's still there, it just can't talk to other CPU's. Still, in theory, even these crippled CPU's could still run in SMP with a special motherboard that implemented a totally external PIC. (just wouldn't be Intel's SMP scheme).
AFAIK OpenPIC is totally external to the CPU, so it does not need explicit CPU support. So the K6 *could* have been run in SMP config *if* someone had made a K6 OpenPIC board.
(PIC == programmable interrupt controller)
Re:Asymmetric Multi Processing? (Score:1)
Yes, I WILL buy a board that supports this, that is if I can run Linux on it!
-adnans
Where AMD's multiprocessor really is. (Score:1)
There was a Tyan board that was supposed to come out a long time back but never materialized. The KX133\KT133 chipsets are not capable of SMP, but supposedly VIA will be coming out with a board that can do it.
What you really want to watch out for, however, is the new AMD 760MP motherboard chipset. It's the high performance multiprocessor version of the upcoming 760 chipset.
Re:Info on 760, 760MP (Score:1)
Mine also had the SCSI "controler", it was really a byte-banged SCSI, no smarts on the card. At least I think that is how it worked, but it had a real SCSI connector. I don't think I ever used the SCSI at all. At one point I had thought of using it to test "IP over SCSI", but then someone published a 1Apr RFC about it, and I lost intrest in pionering the hack :-)
FreeBSD did recognise the SCSI "controler" (well, prior to 4.0 it did). Hmmmm, I should have uncrated my old Atari ST drive (it is a 20M SCSI drive with a SCSI to ATSI converter) before it was de-supported... ah well, there is still the 1G drive on my Sun 4/110....
Re:From what I understand... (Score:1)
To where now slotket adapters now include circuitry to do the workaround for you.
Re:wtf? (Score:1)
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Re:SMP Athlons... (Score:1)
Man, that's the whole point of SMP. It would have been pretty useless otherwise. (see also: scalability)
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Re:AMD's Perception in business (Score:1)
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Re:AMD's Perception in business (Score:1)
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Gigabyte... (Score:1)
1 AGP
5 PCI
2 ISA
damn straight.
(what to do when I next upgrade? I don't wanna buy a new pci parport card or scsi-1 controller... but most new boards dont even have 1 ISA)
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Re:From what I understand... (Score:1)
Look at Abit with the BP6, its the most popular motherboard they ever sold! there are entire websites dedicated to it. And dude to that, they have recently released the VP6, which looks to be another sweet dual cpu board. And with the specs that bad boy has... i don't think they will have ANY problems selling it
Counterpoint (Re:Why wait?) (Score:1)
On whose authority? Just because Job's said so? To be fair, the benchmarks jobs was running were crooked Photoshop benchmarks that were solely optimised for the Mac, if he run a standard benchmark then I'd be interested in the performance.
Of course, for many of the Mac power users, Photoshop is *the* application where they need as much performance as they can get. Plus, it really wasn't that crooked, since they ran a "real world" application with a "real world" use of that application. It wasn't a synthetic benchmark, but doing something graphic artists need to do on a daily basis. Now, extrapolating that result to general performance is the problem. But since most of Apple's pro market does graphics of that kind, this is relevant benchmark.
Also, during Job's presentation when he introduced the G4 SMP, he just said "we're going to compare it to a 1ghz P3", great but I'd like to know more details than just "a 1giz P3", which chipset? how much memory? the graphics card? the hard disk type etc? You get the picture; it was hardly a objective test.
It was an off the shelf machine... not a custom built machine. So you can get specs from the OEM. Plus they did state they had outfitted them as close as possible to identical specs.
Also, you have to remember you could buy 3 or 4 Athlons for the price of a G4.
Are you talking CPU's or machines? G4 chips are cheaper than Athlons (in quantity), but Apple does have one of the highest margins in the PC biz. However, 3-4 vs. 1? I think not.
The big difference is that you can go cheap on PC components... decide instead of buying a rock solid Socket A motherboard like the Asus A7V, go buy a Biostar or something like that for 30-40% less. Same goes for components like RAM, hard drives, etc. While Apple may not use the *best* components, they use some very good components (like the latest IBM 7200rpm ATA drives). We could build almost identical (by spec) 1ghz Athlon T-bird boxes, but yet be several hundred dollars or more apart in price just by changing the quality level of some of the components.
BTW, the cheapest dual 500Mhz G4 box you can get from Apple goes for $2449 through Build To Order. At that price, you still get two IEEE 1394 ports, gigabit ethernet, DVD-ROM, and of course, the ability to run Mac OS X (definitely worth the price premium).
Re:SMP: Tyan (Score:1)
Re:SMP: Tyan (Score:1)
under motherboards.
Re:From what I understand... (Score:1)
You're in the same boat I am. I've pretty much personally resigned to waiting until about mid-March next year, just based on gut feel.
--Joe--
Iran and Iraq (Score:1)
And I ran, ran so far away...
And if I rack up enough puns here, I may not need to go to Kuro5hin [kuro5hin.org] today.
Re:Info on 760, 760MP (Score:1)
Duron Duron (Score:1)
Re:The patent is wrt to APIC (Score:1)
>different SMP drivers for the SMP Athlon boards
>to replace the APIC code.
Considering that Linux already supports SMP Alphas (up to 32-way has already been tested under 2.4-pre with no scalability problems), if Athlon uses the same technique I doubt there would be much new code required to get Linux to use it. :)
Rob
Re:No Chipsets Avail, waiting for AMD (Score:2)
Indeed, Hotrail to cancel their 8 way AMD chipset, but the company who took it on themselves to work on is Alpha Processors Inc (API)
But the CPU does support SMP in this case. (Score:2)
But many patents can be worked around. (Score:2)
But unfortunately, the workaround made the K6 SMP protocol incompatible with that of the Pentium. And AMD wasn't big enough at the time for any chipset/mobo manufacturer to justify creating a new SMP mobo for a small market.
Dunno about the Athlon, but... (Score:2)
Re:AMD's Perception in business (Score:2)
They are not even homogenous. Go to Dell's site, and look up a given model, then check, say, audio drivers. There will be 15 different audio drivers mentioned. Yes, they really do use different audio chipsets in systems with the exact same badge designation (i.e. Dimension XPS600R). And no, they can't tell you what chipset you have in your system if you go to their web site and punch in your unique "service code" from the back of your system.
About the only thing homogenous about Dells are the ugly, thumb-busting, nasty cases.
The ONLY reason to buy Dell is that they will replace any nonfunctioning part of your system, at their cost (shipping included), if you are patient enough to sit through 3 or 4 tech calls and go through their standardized rigamarole (sp?) for determining what component is bad (yeah, you may know that it is the video card, but the Dell techie has to convince himself as well).
Re:AMD's Perception in business (Score:2)
We have had:
* A Dell system which would shut itself off after 3 or 4 minutes, every single time it was powered on. After being patient with Dell tech support over the course of several weeks while they tried sending new memory, a new motherboard, and a new power supply (not all at once, but over the course of several weeks), they finally took back the whole system, after determining that it was their goofy power switch (I suspected this from the beginning). The good news is that they replaced a two year old Pentium 233 system with a brand new Pentium II 400 system at no cost to us.
* Dell's audio cards in their Dimension models of two years ago used this crummy, Dell-only version of the Montego sound card which the Turtle Beach people would not provide support for. Dell had cut a special deal with Turtle Beach to provide a cheaper version of their card that Dell would support, so that Dell could save a couple of bucks. The only drivers that Dell could provide for Windows NT would blue screen the system when you tried to install them.
* We have had many, many of the mice on Dell systems go bad. OK, they are Microsoft Mice, not really Dell's fault, but still. They could have chosen better mice.
* We have had two or three Dell monitors go bad. They were replaced without cost to us by Dell but it was a bit of a pain.
We have about 65 Dell systems where I work. Maybe the above problems are par for the course for PC's, but I would have a hard time believing that they are better than average.
Furthermore, Dell's cases DO suck. Trust me. Let one age for about a year and a half and then try to open it. You WILL bust your thumbs. Their case design is STUPID. I have worked with many cases. Screwless cases are not a big deal anymore. They are a dime a dozen. But 99% of them are designed MUCH better than Dell's cases. We have at least three or four systems on which the case no longer fits properly because of the force required to open them after they have frozen shut, and the fact that they are held in place by some rather soft plastic.
I have an Enlight case at home and it is by no means special or unique. It is FAR easier to work with than any Dell case I have ever used. No modern case is going to make it difficult to add hard drives. Trust me, I work on these things ALOT, I know a crappy case when I see one, and Dell's really suck.
I am NOT "spouting hackneyed Slashdot wisdom". I have quite a bit of experience supporting Dell systems. I know what I am talking about. Dell has its good points and bad points, but the original poster did not hit on the good points and spoke of some of Dell's bad points as being good.
Re:SMP Athlons... (Score:2)
Why would that be impossible? The Cray T3E managed to make use of that many Alpha processors, although they're using the EV5 and not the EV6 architecture, like the Athlon.
No doubt he meant 1000 processor SMP machine. The T3E is an MPP machine. A 1000 processor SMP machine would suffer way too much bus contention to be worthwhile, even as a 'because I can' hack. It would be hard to imagine an application that could benefit from such a set-up. Even harder to imagine one that wouldn't work as well or better on an MPP machine.
And Pay The AAPL Tax? (Score:2)
The Apple SMP systems seem fairly nice, but rather expensive.
It's not a realistic alternative unless I can specify the specs rather than living with whatever AAPL tells me I can buy.
I've idly watched the OpenPPC [openppc.org] project; apparently the direct offspring, Pop Computers, found that they had severe procurement problems.
This does not a viable market make.
Re:wtf? (Score:2)
Actually, he's been to a great deal of hardware sites, but he found very little solid information.
First, he went to AMD's web site. He browsed it thoroughly, and then did a number of searches. He discovered that AMD has essentially no information on their website about SMP, period. Almost no mention of it, even.
He then checked out Tom's hardware, Ars Technica, as well as 4 other similar hardware review and news sites. Do you know what he found there? A few rumors about AMD's supporting SMP, a single mention of 760MP chipset, without any dates or informaiton on it, and a couple of claims that AMD would have an SMP motherboard out sometime in 2001.
He wasn't impressed with most of the information out there.
You see, I wasn't looking for vague rumors, I was looking for facts. I was hoping that someone might have heard something from a reputable source, or someone might have a URL or two to a site that I haven't checked.
I'm glad that you were able to provide some insightful commentary here. Thank you for helping 'make slashdot what it has become'.
--
Toph
You should wait... (Score:2)
OS X doesn't offer a command line unless you buy server or developer versions for a lot more money.
Linux, I don't think is running on those machines.
OS X is slower than Linux on the same platform.
Yes, there IS a SMP alternative to Intel- and it's called Alpha. They're insanely great machines- just insanely expensive as well. G4 an alternative to Intel? Only when Motorola or IBM get off their duffs and sell SMP machines with the G4's processors.
Re:Info on 760, 760MP (Score:2)
Intresting. I havn't heard about this issue. When my old (duel) PPro motherbord died, I bought a K7, and a K7 motherbord, and PC100 memory (ECC, because I'm that way), and an ATX mobo and PC Power And Cooling power supply (because it is quiet, and the same brand I've been buying for years, and was one of the few things that AMD did say there were compatability problems with). I took all the cards and drives from the old system and moved them to the new system.
They all worked. Including my generic NCR SCSI. Including my oddball ISA sound card. Including my cheap as crap ISA video card. Both of which I had bought for the PC I first built in 1992! I did get rid of the ISA sound card a few weeks later (FreeBSD funally stopped supporting it a decade after the makers went bankrupt, and I didn't feel like fixing the driver myself). I got rid of the graphics card too (so I could be ISA free -- it is my home server, and runs with no monitor most of the time, so the crappy graphics were just fine). Both were replaces with "store brand" PCI cards costing about $30 each.
Zero compatability problems.
Have you personally seen any compatability problems? Did the failed part work in another machine?
I hope so too. But I have little hope of Compaq doing it. After all they have the multi-way chipset (40+ CPUs) for the Alpha which would take little or no tweaking to work with the K7 "just" a BIOS, which shouldn't be hard for the first compony to reverse engener the IBM PC BIOS....
P.S. now that I think back on it, the ISA video ard may not have been from '92, it may have been newer then that. But the sound card was that old (ProAudio Spectrum bought at a Microprose employe discount not all that long before the compony that made 'em vanished, nice card though)
wtf? (Score:2)
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Re:SMP Athlons... (Score:2)
Why would that be impossible? The Cray T3E managed to make use of that many Alpha processors, although they're using the EV5 and not the EV6 architecture, like the Athlon.
I doubt that designing that beast would be desirable, though. There aren't that many companies who know how to build systems scaling up to 1000+ CPUs. Cray is one such company, and SGI seems to be another (allegedly building a 1024-CPU Origin 3000 on special order).
But impossible? No.
(This is, of course, blatantly ignoring that "chipset" is a very, uhm, simplified way of speaking about multi-CPU support.)
Re:You should wait... (Score:2)
Bullshit.
>Linux, I don't think is running on those machines.
You meam, you suppose?? Bzzt. More bullshit.
>OS X is slower than Linux on the same platform.
Benchmarks please. No?
Twm runs faster than Enlightenment, but I know plenty of "power users" who don't run E, or any WM at all. If the benchmark difference comes out within -/+ 8%.. no one will care.
>Yes, there IS a SMP alternative to Intel- and it's called Alpha. They're insanely great machines- just insanely expensive as well.
Considering how much easier it is to buy a Linux-only box compared to a Linux-only PPC box, the Alpha community has pretty weak excuses for having less commercial software support. Loki is doing a great job at porting x86 games to PPC Linux (cept Quake, but that's up to iD..)
> G4 an alternative to Intel? Only when Motorola or IBM get off their duffs and sell SMP machines with the G4's
I think there lies your only valid point. But Motorola/IBM is not in this part of the systems field. You can buy CPU's, and chipsets from them but what will you use for a motherboard? IBM released a reference design, but no one implemented it.
What needs to happen is some enterprising company to strike a deal with LinuxPPC, to get enough orders to make production worthwhile.
I absolutely hate x86... my two boxes here have 8 and 4 fans each and they're too hot to stick in a closet.
My problem with the Mac stuff is it's too nice for my budget, not it's "too expensive"
Linux makes ALL architectures equal (well, yeah, you need good compilers). These days, even Motorola sells Intel-CPU servers.... they consider their own hardware to be too much of a gamble! With Linux possibly taking over the market, Motorola has a chance to ride tthose coattails, if only someone at the top had some vision.
Athlon & SMP (Score:2)
Re:From what I understand... (Score:2)
The patent is wrt to APIC (Score:2)
Sorta. As I recall, Intel owns patents which cover the APIC (Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller), and these patents are related to APIC programming in an SMP environment. The K5 and K6's used the OpenPIC standard to avoid this, but there were no OpenPIC boards and so effectively no SMP w/ K5 and K6.
The EV6-style SMP that Athlon uses avoids both of these issues by using an SMP model which has existing boards (the SMP Alpha boards) and which isn't covered by Intel's patents. (Of course, the Alpha boards can't be used directly for some reason, but at least they're closer than the non-existant boards for the K5s and K6s). I imagine the EV6-style SMP requires different OS support, though. That is, Linux, BeOS and WinNT would all need different SMP drivers for the SMP Athlon boards to replace the APIC code. (Basically, they avoid the Intel patent by not designing to Intel's MP spec, but that would imply that OSes need to have differen't MP drivers to support it.)
--Joe--
Re:I'd thought 14 was the limit? (Score:2)
Are you sure about that? Nothing like each chip being assigned a number out of a small and fixed pool of chip IDs?
The number 14 looks very suspicious to me in this regard (2^4 - 2).
OTOH, I haven't read detailed specs on the EV6 bus, and Compaq has recently started offering SMP systems with maximum processor counts greater than 14.
Re:Asymmetric Multi Processing? (Score:2)
Re:From what I understand... (Score:2)
Summer trip to AMD (Score:2)
AFAIK, SMP is coming soon... (Score:2)
"If ignorance is bliss, may I never be happy.
Re:But the CPU does support SMP in this case. (Score:2)
Even the K6 (Maybe, definately the K6-2 and K6-3) supported SMP.
I don't think this is true. IIRC the story was that the K5 (remember that!) was smp capable but because no-one ever made smp motherboards for it, AMD gave up on SMP for the K6. The Athlon is the first AMD SMP capable processor since the K5.
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Re:SMP Athlons... (Score:2)
Can you build SMP systems incrementally? I.e., buy a 760 motherboard and a single CPU for starters, and then add a second CPU as an upgrade a few months later?
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AMD's CPU connections are different (Score:2)
Seems unlikely. The electrical interface that AMD uses (which is the same one DEC's Alpha uses) is not, in fact, a bus architecture, but rather a port. Each CPU has dedicated lines to the a "hub" chip. So you would need significantly more silicon to make a dual-processor chipset, as compared to a single-processor chipset. It seems generally agreed that this design is superior to the Intel bus design (it scales to 1000s of processors, compared to Intel's eight), but it does make thing a bit trickier on the low-end.
SMP Systems have a huge margin advantage over single CPU systems.
Very true. Why do SMP systems cost so much more? Because the people using them are willing to pay so much more.
With SMP you can start using the magic words "server" and "workstation" which translates into higher profits for the resellers.
"Server". There, I just used the magic word on a single-processor system!
AMD's Perception in business (Score:2)
My policy is to buy Dell returns from DFO for desktops (they are new, just no warranty) and yes, they all come with Intel CPU's (Dell's choice not mine). We are now getting P3-733's with 133 frontside as "used" Dells. They are single CPU boxes. The reasons for my Dell-only are quality, homogeneity, ease of maintenance.
The cost difference between AMD and Intel is not enough to materially impact this policy, as I'd need to go with a different vendor; most business class machines (most of my desktops are for developers) only come with Intel, Compaq's AMD boxes are all low end.
All our servers (production and office) are low end SMP capable, and are either USparc-III (Sun Ex50's) or 2-way P3 boxes (Penguin, Dell, IBM).
Where I'd really kill for a good AMD is in the laptop arena - we use midrange laptops, mostly for business people (sales and marketing) who don't really need performance. In keeping with our frugal policy, we don't get monitors but we do make sure laptops have decent displays (1024x768 TFT) and this means we are forced to buy Celerons, which suck.
We have one real el-cheapo laptop, a bottom of the range $1000 Toshiba which we use as a test console for the server rooms. It was mine before we got venture capital. It has an AMD, K6-3 I think. The screen sucks (800x600 DS) but it kicks a $2000 Celeron laptop for performance, and the power consumption is very modest.
If I could get a decent midrange laptop with a good screen and an AMD cpu, I'd buy one in a heartbeat; on both performance and battery life, AMD kicks butt in the mobile market.
Re:Simple answer: yes. (Score:2)
Re:SSE on Mustang? (Score:2)
Re:SSE on Mustang? (Score:2)
Re:Info on 760, 760MP (Score:2)
Here's the latest roadmap [impress.co.jp], in Japanese pastel no less.
8 months at the earliest--i.e. Q3 of next year. And that's for Tualatin, their
The real story about Intel that their Pentium 4 is being manufactured here in Israel (in Kiryat Gat), and they got LOTS of problems with that (like low numbers of chips on 1 waffer, only 2 machines to product the P4), so until Intel gets more machines to produce those chips - this will take long time.
This story was posted here in the Israeli newspapers..
Well if it was a repeat of this piece at The Register [theregister.co.uk], it may have misinterpreted things. For one thing, 70% yield on a new chip is quite impressive. For another, while a yield of 70,000 chips/week is not enough to substantially affect the x86 market, 70,000 represents more CPUs made in a week (and before launch no less) than there were 1 GHz P3s made for the first 6 months after its "launch"!
In any case, no OEM is going to buy many of the initial P4s, because Intel is planning a packaging change in March or so. That means new motherboards, new systems, and another entire validation process for OEM's--something that most of them are not going to want to waste time doing twice. Thus they'll only offer a couple models, in limited quantities, of the original P4, so it doesn't matter that only limited quantities will be fabbed.
In essence the first P4 will be positioned quite a bit like the original PPro. Whether the Willamette core ends up as successful as the P6 core has (remember, the PPro introduced the core now powering Celeron and P3) will be interesting to see.
Re:Three words: lack of demand (Score:2)
Re:Patents (Score:2)
Re:You should wait... (Score:2)
That's not true. The terminal app comes standard with MacOS X, regardless of whether or not you get the optional developer package.
The pricing on the developer software has not been fixed, and the decision may even end up being to include the developer CD along with the standard system CD for free. Beats me what they'll actually end up doing, though. You just never know with Steve...
Re:Info on 760, 760MP (Score:2)
Re:No Chipsets Avail, waiting for AMD (Score:2)
<a href="http://www.ebnonline.com/ecomponents/commne
760 Chipset is required (Score:2)
SSE on Mustang? (Score:2)
How do you think that SSE & SSE2 will be implimented in upcoming AMD CPUs starting with the mustang.
IIRC, KNI/SSE is just a clone of 3DNow! which debuted in the AMD K6 line.
<O
( \
XPlay Tetris On Drugs [8m.com]!
How G3/G4 is "Twice as fast" as PII (Score:2)
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XPlay Tetris On Drugs [8m.com]!
Kernel AMD SMP (Score:2)
Oh my god! (Score:2)
This has got to be the first time in recent slashdot history that a "post #1" has gotten any moderation other than down...
I think this deserves a toast, a slashdot story, and a redundent story, just to be sure!
Re:From what I understand... (Score:2)
All I want (Score:2)
Difficulties in Slot A SMP chipsets (Score:2)
AMD is a licensee of most of those patents. (Score:2)
One of the side-effects of that merger is that AMD and Intel have a very comprehensive patent cross-licensing deal, which was "inherited" from National Semiconductor. This is why Intel has not attempted to sue AMD for patent infringement since the days of the K5 cpu. It's also the reason that Intel forced the "Slot 1" bus architecture down the throats of most of the mobo companies a few years back: it was "new" and thus not covered by the agreement. Unfortunatly, it also turned out to be both a political and an engineering mistake, leading to the current chilly relationship between Chipzilla and most of the taiwanese mobo companies...
Expected 1st Quarter next year. (Score:2)
Re:AMD SMP - "Sledgehammer" is SMP on a chip (Score:2)
From there I think it likely that AMD will produce 4, 8, 16, etc chips-per-die instead of plugging them into a motherboard. Although I guess it depends when they run into the bandwidth bottleneck.
Suppose that's when they'll start pumping that EV6 DDR bus up to 400mhz, etc.
Drooling profusely here.
The correct information on AMD and smp (Score:2)
SMP for Athlon (Score:2)
Both AMD and VIA are planning SMP chipsets. Check out http://www.viahardware.com/roadmap2000.shtm for VIA's roadmap. There should be a chipset out just in time for Christmas if we're lucky!
I remember reading an article about a test of a Dual Thunderbird board, but I can't remember where... It was a beta board with a very early release of VIA's chipset anyway. They didn't actually test the SMP, they guys were more interested in the DDR support...
Cheers,
Re:Info on 760, 760MP (Score:3)
Quite some time before the Athlon came out, I myself bought a K6-2/300 (which I still have, happily chugging away as a Linux server) and had all kinds of hassles with the Aladdin V chipset and various and sundry cards. I eventually ended up buying a BX-chipset board instead, and was much much happier with it. Even now Linux doesn't run as well as it should, as it doesn't seem to have any support for that IDE chipset and leaves all the drives in non-DMA mode. It doesn't do much work so that's okay for me, but it's a bit annoying.
With Athlon machines, the biggest problem was simply inadequate power supplies. Those chips suck power like nothing else before them (I think the new P4 will suck even more!) and if you put a nice fast GeForce DDR (another power hog) in there, many motherboards and/or power supplies were simply overwhelmed by the demand. Your purchase of that PCPAC power supply was probably the best money you spent in that machine, and may have saved you lots of trouble.
There have also been AGP driver issues with some of the Athlon chipsets, though I haven't yet owned one and don't know the details. I CAN tell you that the compatibility problems have been severe enough that I held off buying an Athlon. It sounds like the KT133 chipset has it pretty well together, finally, but I will probably hold out a bit longer and go SMP when those ship. I haven't done an SMP machine yet for myself, though I have wanted to for a long time.
Oh, another thought: it sounds like you had pretty good luck with your system, but remember that you weren't running fast 3-d graphics and/or Win9X either -- video drivers have been especially problematic. You were running against 'old' standards that are very well documented and easily testable. A lot of people are buying Athlons to game with, and gaming taxes a system harder than almost anything else you can do with it. AGP appears to be something of an evolving standard, too, so there are all sorts of niggling little details that differ from chipset to chipset, and can cause weird behavior that you would never see on a BSD-based server.
My $0.02.
SMP: Tyan (Score:3)
Re:SMP Athlons... (Score:3)
Should be possible with Athlon, too. You can leave CPU sockets without CPU in Intel SMP configurations and the remaining CPUs are used properly. However, you have to put in termination dummies in order to not degrade the CPU bus signal quality. Since AMD uses the Alpha way for SMP, it won't have a CPU bus but separate ports on the chipset for every CPU, so you may not need terminators for those.
I'd thought 14 was the limit? (Score:3)
Actually, my understanding was that limitations in the bus protocol limited SMP machines to 14 processors, as with Alpha machines. For more than that, you use a hierarchical scheme or clustering.
From what I understand... (Score:3)
It is not the CPU but the Motherboard that can't support SMP. Maybe the MB manufacturers are waiting on a reference board or chipset from AMD? Does anyone know if the Irongate chipset is the holdback or is it simply the Motherboard configuration? (I have a feeling that the AMD motherboard chipset is not ready)
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Some more news... (Score:3)
These should be available this fall. As we all know; VIA has no problem introducing a new chipset to the motherboard manufacturers and no doubt will have no problem getting boards made with their chipset. As many of us know, the same Irongate chipset that many of us use for Slot A Athlons was perfectly capable of running the Socket A CPUs as well and was always available to motherboard manufacturers. Despite this, manufacturers still opted to use a VIA chipset instead and delay availability of their boards because of this.
Re:Kernel AMD SMP (Score:3)
EV6 is an insanely scalable (1000's of processors) architecture (as compared to intels apic -- like 8 procs or something )
The kernel might not need that much work as smp alpha stuff is already in place.
AMD SMP (Score:3)
Plan to see SMP as production exceeds demand or at least keeps abreast of it. Also it has been widely reported that AMD is concentrating on introducing the "Sledgehammer" with an SMP MB chipset almost from introduction.
Re:From what I understand... (Score:3)
However, that's only the parts cost. SMP Systems have a huge margin advantage over single CPU systems. With SMP you can start using the magic words "server" and "workstation" which translates into higher profits for the resellers. And high profits are what endears OEMs to a particular vendor, and makes them more likely to adopt your product across an entire lineup.
Right now, it's not that big of a deal for AMD, because they are selling out their entire production capacity, and they aren't even in the high end markets. However, if they ever want to have a chance of winning a bid for corporate machines from a big OEM like Compaq or IBM (which make huge margins on Intel SMP machines), they need SMP support. It's critical enough in the long term that they should subsidize the mobo guys if that's what it takes.
Re:Alpha MB (Score:3)
Asymmetric Multi Processing? (Score:3)
Can someone who has knowledge about operating systems, especially process cheduling, comment that a bit? Can users be sure that the most CPU hungry thread/process is run on the fastest CPU?
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Re:SMP Athlons... (Score:3)
http://www.aceshardware.com/Spades/read_news.php?
Re:Alpha MB (Score:4)
Motherboards include ROMs, for things like setup, BIOS and booting up in the first place. Alpha uses a different instruction set, so a 386-instruction chip like Athlon wouldn't read it.
The mobo vendor could probably do an AMD port of the board. API is unlikely to since their job is to sell Alpha processors, not mobos. Somebody else with an Alpha SMP mobo would be a better candidate.
No Chipsets Avail, waiting for AMD (Score:4)
The first Chipsets capable of supporting SMP, AMD's 760MP(a SMP-enabled version of the 760, due out very late this year or early next year) and the 770 chipset, which is expected to have support of up to 4 CPUs, and due out early next year.
As far as VIA and otehr third-party chipset manufacturers, they are still awaitin a chipset from AMD, before they can begin making their own SMP chipsets.
AMD's plans for a more advanced (4 and 8-way)chipset also had to be canceled when the company they were working with (forgot the name at the moment) decided to leave the server chipset business, leaving AMD to work on the chipsets on its own.
SMP Athlons... (Score:4)
In fact, they are SMP limited by the chipsets: If a chipset existed, you could run a box with 1000 Athlon processors - of course, designing such a beast would be impossible...
At any rate, Ace's Hardware has been covering AMD's products fairly diligently. They've posted several articles about the 760MP (The SMP capable Athlon chipset.) One good example is available here: http://www.aceshardware.com/Spades/read_news.php?
From what I understand, the 760MP should be finished between December and January, and on store shelves late Q1 2000.
VIA is working on it (Score:4)
I bet that not long after this chipset hits that companies like Abit have dual socket A motherboards, and for an attractive price. Especially considering that 700 MHz Durons, which are in some respects (FPU) better than a 700 Mhz P3, can be had for under $90...
It sucks how slow SMP for Athlon has been coming, but I think when it does hit, Intel will lose a lot of face. The "Mustang" core Athlon is supposed to be the next stage, a chip that competes with Intel's way WAY overpriced Xeon line.
Info on 760, 760MP (Score:5)
It has been pointed out that one of the major reasons AMD has taken so long to get SMP going is that they already sell all of their processors anyways, and already have commitments for all the K7 chips they can make through the end of the year. This is true, but misses a more important point: with some few exceptions (i.e. nerds like us
1) Many if not most Intel SMP boxes are currently stuffed with Xeons. Thus, AMD has been perfectly content waiting for the release of their upcoming "Mustang" core tweak, featuring up to 1MB L2 cache--due out...you guessed it...in December or January--before rolling out the 760MP. Conversely, the big-L2 Mustangs without an SMP-capable chipset are dead-in-the-water.
2) By and large, business still clings to the notion of AMD as a cut-rate unreliable chip company. Despite the fact that knowledgable consumers have switched over to the cheaper faster Athlon in droves, Intel still has a nearly complete monopoly over the x86 business market. This impression of AMD as the "cheapo generic brand" persists despite Intel racking up delay after delay, errata after errata, recall after recall, embarrassment after embarrassment (i820, i840, 1.13GHz P3, Itanium) in the past year and a half. AMD knows that if they release the 760MP and it runs into one rumor of one conflict with one obscure 3D graphics card no business machine would ever contain anyways, their foray into the high-margin world of business computing is over before it began. (Never mind that Intel can release the i840, their new workstation-quality top-of-the-line chipset, with an "errata" which rendered it unusable with ECC memory!) Thus they are being very careful, and rightly so, with their validation process on this one.
Interestingly enough, if they get their act together (and purchasing departments take their heads out of their asses), AMD has a major market opportunity on their hands here. The Coppermine Xeon (i.e. a plain-old Coppermine P3 with $200 tacked on to the price) is incapable of scaling past 1GHz until Intel moves to a
That leaves AMD with a quarter as the sole supplier of GHz+ large-cache multiprocessing x86 CPUs. Will that be enough to get them into the lucrative enterprise market?? Hard to say. After all, you never get fired for buying Intel...
Alpha MB (Score:5)
I have read on internet (www.aceshardware.com I think) that you can use existing alpha mb to put K7 into it; word is the K7 uses the Slot A (DEC Alpha) interface and so is supposed to support alpha style SMP. So the K7 should have nice SMP, scable up to 32 processors.
If you wanted just dual processors, this implies A UP2000 [alpha-processor.com] or suchlike would do the job, but I can't say for sure.
Here's a qoute from Paul Jakma
Interestingly the new *Alpha* 21264 UP1000 motherboard uses the AMD Irongate chipset.. they also have a dual 21264 UP2000 board based on a DEC chipset. So it seems K7/Alpha chipsets are interchangeable, so then K7 SMP is probably possible using the DEC chipset.
And here's a qoute from Acehardware.com:
Alpha:Slot-A:Slot-B:Athlon KH Yeap Wednesday,
June 23, 1999 (10:00 AM EST)
Ok, at the ongoing PC Expo in New York, Alpha
Processor Inc. is demo'ing its new
Alpha-21264 750 Mhz, which is expected to
come out in July. More interestingly a 1 Ghz
versions of the processor, which runs under
regular air-cool condition, is also demo'ed
along with a Slot-A motherboard, UP1000, and
a Slot-B motherboard, UP2000. For further
details check out this News.com report.
Now, a lot of people have been wondering
about the possibility of running a K7 on an
Alpha Slot-A or Slot-B motherboard. According
to Alpha, yes, this is possible. To make
things even more interesting Alpha's new
Slot-A motherboard, UP1000, uses a chipset
that is a hybrid between AMD's very own K7
chipset, Irongate (AMD-751), and ALI's
M1543C!! PC Watch Japan has a great shot of
this UP1000 motherboard. Also appears on PC
Watch is a photo of the Slot-B UP2000 and a
photo of the 1 Ghz Slot-B Alpha processor.
Special thanks to Daiki for this wonderful
tips.
So, you could try an Alpha dual-processor Motherboard but I can't give you any garuntees.
Michael
...another comment from Michael Tandy.