News
AMD’s Athlon MP Line Makes Bid For Enterprise Market
- By Scott Bekker
- June 05, 2001
Advanced Micro Devices
Corp. has gained attention from computer enthusiasts for its Athlon line of
processors, but despite their low cost, few enterprises and OEMs have used them
in servers, since they did not support multiprocessing. However, AMD released two
new processors and a chipset Tuesday to offer an alternative for two-way
computing.
“This basically starts the attack on the enterprise
market,” says Bob Mitton director of servers and workstations at AMD. Now that
AMD can offer two-way processing, it can make a credible play for the commodity
server market.
Released in 1.2GHz and 1.0GHz models, the Athlon MP is
specially designed for two-way environments – other Athlon models cannot be
used. Mitton says that additional functions had to be built into the chip. “It
has to understand that it runs with another processor,” he explains.
AMD also released a chipset to support the Athlon MP
line, the 760 MP chipset. Although the chipset is based on AMD’s uniprocessor
760 chipset, the memory and processor controller has features to aid multiprocessing.
For example, the controller can read what data is on the processor cache, and
copy the data to the other processor. Tyan
Computer Corp. has shipped the first Athlon MP motherboard using the 760 MP
chipset.
The new chipset supports another feature critical to
enterprise customers, Error Correcting Code (ECC) memory. “You want to catch
and correct as many errors as possible,” Mitton says, “ECC is a requirement for
the enterprise.”
Mitton says AMD will target the appliance and scalable
server market with the MP line. He
believes that AMD can make its biggest impact with these customers who consider
both price and performance when making purchase decisions.
AMD expect to extend its multiprocessing to four- and
eight-way systems with the release of its 64-bit “Hammer” architecture. Mitton
does not believe demand will exist for some time for 32-bit AMD chips in these
configurations.
Due to testing and qualification concerns, none of the
major OEMs are shipping Athlon MP systems today. One Linux-focused vendor, Rauch Median Inc. offered two-way Athlon
systems on its website at the time of release. –Christopher McConnell
About the Author
Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.