AMD's Athlon MP & Tyan's Thunder K7
Over the past two years AMD have established themselves as one of the two premier chipmakers for the desktop market. Today we will be looking at the products they hope will make a name for them in the workstation and server arena. The Dual Athlon MP system is finally here. This is the next logical step for AMD since they have managed to eat up quite a large chunk of the desktop market share since August 1999, but have, as of yet, been virtually invisible in the high-end business segment. Yes, some forward thinking companies like Boeing have put together huge clusters of Athlon based machines - but what AMD wants is for the less forward thinking companies to regard them as the company to bank on for their computer needs instead of their competitors.
To do this AMD has just announced a new processor, which they hope will challenge Intel’s Dual Pentium III and Dual XEON line of processors. This chip, whose codename Palomino has been changed to Athlon MP is the next step in the evolution of the previous Athlon Thunderbird. Besides a few new features which should help performance and long-term life the Athlon MP's main selling point is the ability to run in Dual processor machines (with support from AMD). To achieve this, AMD has also announced the AMD 760MP (762) Northbridge, which will allow motherboards to run two processors and utilize SMP
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