Originally Posted by k7geek
The pair on my desk does. .....

Neither does any AMD chip yet.

Originally Posted by k7geek
Er, who cares if the P4 price drops?? P4 doesn\'t do SMP.

Good to be back, Forge.
I'm up to snuff on all thing tech (well, reasonably anmyways), and especially all thing TR.
Took a couple of marathon sessions to accomplish, though.

On the PSU, you're saying it currently takes 1.5 times 300W PP 303X to equal one 400W PP404X. And that this indicates that it would take 2 x 300W to = 1x 450W?
Hrm. And here I thought I now had a good use for all those crappy 100W-200W OEM PSU's cluttering my basement and workspace.

Re: who said that KT266 would support Dual Athlons.

Pull the other one! The whole feature about MP Athlons is that each one gets its own bus to the North Bridge, hence you increase the pin count massively. Which is why AMD 762 is so expensive to produce, and is physically very large (see the photos at AcesHardware, it is in a similar package to a K6-2!)

Re: Dual Fosters, nah. Forget them. Even with the extortionate price that Intel will charge for them, the speed will drop quite a bit from 1U systems as you have to keep the two caches coherent with each other, hence you will get a cache miss more often and I'm pretty sure this means you have to clear the pipeline and go to slower main memory (the slow RAMBUS latency hasn't gone away, you know.. here that will again be the limiting factor)

Still, if you want one, feel free! We'll sit here smug with our Dual Morgan 900s overclocked to 1.2GHz :o)

OK, I've never seen that one before...

*scratches head, puzzled*

I think a reader just had a stroke while preparing his answer or somesuch.

dgjhghdh jh jjjfggggggggg

AG #37 - Did you not read the last half dozen answers that came before yours? We've already been discussing the PSU requirements.

Oh yeah, one other interesting tidbit you guys might want to know. They were talking about power supplies at the tech tour also. 460w sound good? Well that's what AMD is going to recommend, although they said you could get away with less depending on the supply. Somehow I don't think it is really going to be feasible to go dual duron/athlon right when they become available.

Actually, I aked the tech about parallelizing, and he said you'd have to start with two 300W units *at least* in ordeer to reach the rated amps. Go study several PSUs by the same maker (Antec works great for this). As overall wattages increase linearly, 3.3+5V rail totals increase at a rate higher than linear. In other words, going by the 3.3+5 totals, and using my old Antec PP-303X as a baseline, my new 404X is rated to almost 150% of the 303X's top 3.3+5 score. That kind of got munged, hope you can puzzle it out.

BTW, welcome back, lenzenm. Already back up to speed?

On the PSU issue, I have read that it is possible to run 2 or more ATX PSU's in parallel, with only a little wiring. I will post a link if I find it again. /enables web-ferret mode.
This would negate the need to purchase an expsensive 450W PSU, when a cheap 150W - 250W would boost your existing 300 to meet these requirements.

I'm certain Kyle meant Morgan. Appaloosa is a different model, and not near release, as Morgan is.

I heard that bit about the PSU, too. Sounds steep, but everybody was bitching about having to pick up 300W units 1.5 years ago, when Athlon required it. It's not a bad idea by any means, as my computer related quality of life got much, much higher once I picked up an Antec 400W job.

There's a newspost over on [H] that says the SMP-supported Durons will be "Appaloosa". Is that another name for Morgan, or something totally different? It said Palomino and Appaloosa will be the only SMP-supported Athlons because of the lower power consumption, but "Even so, AMD recommends using an approved 460 Watt power supply!" Yowza

I don't know exactly what AG #30 is trying to say, but I know that the current P4 would have to hit the 100$ price point before I'm interested. I like Tbird's power now, not a P4 that might become a great CPU next year. Next year I plan to be running 64bit....

Alright, if I am barking at the wrong crowd, I will go bark elsewhere.

Okay, Gerbil #22 - so on the 29th Intel drops P4 prices dramatically... this means we're all going to run out and buy them? Oh, and all new memory too? Hardly.

As for the May 8 introduction of Foster... whoopieshit <denotes overwhelming enthusiasm - Not! :P >. My response is the same.

You're barkin' at the wrong crowd.

Rofl! I guess the DFI guy learned, because he just picked someone and asked them, this time. I guess with how bored/tired/impatient we all must've looked, he didn't want us yelling anything at him. :)

Also it was a shame that I had no money to buy the AMD presenter any beers! Otherwise I could have had a wealth of information =)

redpriest

I was at the Tech Tour in Massachusetts on Tuesday. The DFI guy was tough to understand, but I sat all the way in the front. He gave away a motherboard to the person who yelled out the loudest that DFI is the best =)

redpriest

Wow, I made two questions into one mush. Disregard the usage of 'PA' in my last question, it unneccesarily clouds the intent. Or, to rephrase: You a Regular or Link follower?

AG #23 - Now you've really gotten on my curiousity. I'm sure you noticed me, I was the tall guy in a grey shirt and black pants, third or fourth row back, who kept irritating the presenters, and who almost died when the DFI came up and made no sense for 15 minutes. You do anything interesting I would've noticed?

Also, are you another fellow PA TR reader, or did you follow the OCP or 3dchipset linkage? Just curious, no need to answer if you don't want to.

AG #23 - I saw that, too. The thing is, I've *seen* dual Thunderbirds running happily, so the question moves from 'what AMD officially supports' to 'what is actually possible'.

Did you win anything? I got squat. I also thought those wide flat heatsinks and Nidec blowers in the demo 1U system slide were impressive. I would love to have seen the first AMD tech to ponder minimum height of AMD approved HSF versus maximal height of component in 1U system. Must've been a shocker. :)

I was at the Tech tour in Philadelphia on the 19th. According to the roadmap slide we were shown, indications were that the current line of Duron and Athlon would only be 1P - 1 processor(as marked on the roadmap). However, I did note that BOTH the Morgan and Palamino were marked 2P - 2 processor(also as marked on the roadmap). From what I gathered at the tech tour, dual Athlons as well as dual Durons will both be available with the next line of processor and 760MP chipset,

Ok guys, you keep on plugging away. Like I said, April 29th, May8th... just keep waiting and watching.

AG #18 - Odie - That's cool, probably one of the same people that found the R126/127 thing will find you can weld another socket on any time now. Top and bottom sockets! :P

Gerbil #14, I think that I will be having the last laugh. Palomino blows the socks off anything Intel has to offer. period.

Originally Posted by Dink
\"AMD760 requires registered DDR which is just as pricey as PC800 RDRAM\"

Uhm..Hello crack baby. Try 125 bucks for a PC2100 256MB Registered ECC stick. Then try about 250 bucks for a PC800 256MB stick.

Plus, where did you read that AMD760 requires registered dimms? None of the 760 chipsets require registered Dimms. The 760MP won\'t require it, but given it will be used in servers with large memory requirements, it will be desired.

ALL Socket A processors can do SMP, even current generations, but only Palomino CPU's will be 'validated' for SMP operation, according to AMD.

The initial prohibitive cost of 760MP boards will cut down on SMP sales, but a little bird told me KT266 can do SMP...

Odie@viahardware.com

Just guessing, but judging from current Xeon pricing, a dual P4 Xeon with anything except 256kB cache (which is a TOTAL waste of money) is going to set you back AT LEAST $4000 (probably more like $8000 knowing the server market).

Xeons are only good for massive I/O work, not raw processing (get an Alpha if you want muscle). The Xeons added cache and 4 way (or more via a chipset) SMP cost a severe premium.

I am so waiting for dual Athlons (come on Palo's).

Whoops, quad channel RDRAM should be 6.4GB/s

-JO