Athlon T-Birds and SMP

[imported_pak9rabid]

Hey all, after not being able to find an answer to this in the forums and getting shady results in google, I've come here for help.

Basically, I have 2 Athlon thunderbird processors (1.3 GHz) sitting around and would like to have them setup in an SMP (semetrical multi-processing) setup. Is is possible for the Athlon Thunderbird processors to be setup in an SMP setup?

 

[ThEFeAR]

Not too sure about thunderbirds. I remember that Athlon-XP chips could be used in SMP systems if they had the same stepping. People realised this early on, why spend more cash on Athlon XP MP's when normal Athlon XPs worked just fine...

So if they are the same stepping I would give it a try, whats the worst that could happen?

 

[TankGuys]

Originally posted by: pak9rabid
Hey all, after not being able to find an answer to this in the forums and getting shady results in google, I've come here for help.

Basically, I have 2 Athlon thunderbird processors (1.3 GHz) sitting around and would like to have them setup in an SMP (semetrical multi-processing) setup. Is is possible for the Athlon Thunderbird processors to be setup in an SMP setup?

I don't think it's possible. I could be wrong though!

 

[imported_pak9rabid]

yea, I finally came across something that indicated it was possible to use 2 t-birds in an SMP setup.

Now, next question. Does anyone here know of a good dual socket-A motherboard to try this out with?

 

[Maximilian]

Originally posted by: pak9rabid
yea, I finally came across something that indicated it was possible to use 2 t-birds in an SMP setup.

Now, next question. Does anyone here know of a good dual socket-A motherboard to try this out with?

Yea its possible but not recommended. Some benchmarks with 2x thunderbirds vs 2x athlon MP's actually show the thunderbirds getting lower scores than a single thunderbird CPU on its own. They only include a half baked implimentation of SMP, like wilamettes hyperthreading. Not really intended to be taken advantage of. I would put the link up here, but it was ages ago i found this out, when i was pondering on an upgrade to my dual pIII system, which ended up as a dual opteron system.

The best board for dual athon MP's that didnt have some crippling feature was the MSI K7D It dosent lack an AGP port, and the board (usually) comes with a USB 2.0 controller to offset the AMD760's chipset bug that screws up USB 2.0. It is also ATX and fits nicely into an ATX case, somthing that cant be said for every dual cpu socket A board. Of which there arent very many.

Well i went looking and couldnt find the benchmarks, some sites say its ok and similar to the celerom SMP situation. But i found one thing, the above board i recommended only does athlon MP's as the thunderbird apparently wont work witht he AMD760MPX chipset, only the 760MP is supported.

 

[aka1nas]

To add to Soviet's excellent post, you are probably SOL unless you get hold of one of the few 760MP boards. I can only remember the Tyan Thunder K7 myself, and that one needed an EPS 12V PSU and had several other limitations. The 760MPX chipset had some significant improvements and I am actually running a K7D rig as a PVR/encoding rig and would recommend it if you chose to go that route with Athlon XPs.

 

[imported_pak9rabid]

thanks for the awesome responses yall. I figured this would be the best place to ask this. after taking into consideration the performance "adantage" and the price for a dual socket A board to support these CPUs, it looks like it's really not worth messing with. I was just wondering about the possibility, as I just happen to have 2 identical t-birds laying around and wanted to get some experience with SMP in Linux. I'm currently running 1 Athlon XP 2000+ in my server now. It sounds like it'd be better performance-wise just to keep that setup.

Thanks again everyone!