SINCE THE RELEASE OF THE ABIT BP6 motherboard, many computer enthusiasts have lusted after a multiprocessor system. Our own Scott Wasson had dual Celerons running at 500MHz or thereabouts in the DamageBox for some time before finally upgrading to an Athlon board. To this day he gets stars in his eyes when he talks about how wonderful it was to have some intensive task running on your computer with no slowdown whatsoever, or to have a whole other CPU available to summon task manager should a program get out of hand.

Of course, there are also those who will tell you that running multiple processors in your home PC is a waste of money. Relatively little software takes advantage of more than one CPU, and most people don't do the sort of consistent multitasking that benefits from more having more than one CPU to order around.

Today AMD announces its newest SMP-certified processor, the Athlon MP 1900+. Between this announcement and the release of boards with the 760MPX chipset, we thought this was a good time to examine not only AMD's latest multiprocessing powerhouse, but the benefits of SMP in general. Read on to see what we found.