AMD 760MP & Athlon MP - Dual Processor Heaven

Final Words

AMD has indeed come a long way in the past two years; they have gone from the unreliable low-cost manufacturer to the company that offers the highest performing DP x86 platform on the market - and that is exactly what the 760MP is.

Less than a month ago Intel announced their new Xeon processor and today AMD takes away any reason to purchase that very platform. Intel can continue this game of pretending that AMD isn't a threat, but the truth of the matter is that they are and they happen to be a very big one.

Intel isn't ill prepared; with the upcoming Prestonia (Xeon MP) chip supposedly shipping with Jackson technology enabled for the first time, it should be able to give AMD a run for their money, especially the larger cache versions. However that is still over half a year away, and AMD has a lot of time to prepare for that match up. Until then, the real question is, what configuration is best suited for the 760MP?

The new Athlon MP processors are obviously what AMD wants you to use on the platform, in spite of the fact that regular Thunderbirds will work just fine. For all means and purposes, the Athlon MPs are your best bet. The architectural improvements contained within Athlon MP core help considerably in the types of applications that would demand a dual processor solution such as the 760MP.

The Duron is an interesting match for the 760MP but currently the processor isn't too well paired with the platform. In many cases a Dual Pentium III would offer similar if not superior performance. In the future this may change but a crippling factor for the Duron will continue to be its small cache size. In fact, this is a limiting factor for the Athlon cores as well. Larger caches help considerably in these multiprocessor systems, and the market isn't going to want to wait until Hammer before seeing anything larger than 384KB from AMD.

The move to 0.13-micron cores should ideally be met with an increase in L2 cache size for the Athlon MP, it would help tremendously in a lot of the server performance figures.

If you can't tell by now, we're very impressed with the AMD 760MP chipset. In fact, one of the reasons we spent so long on this comparison is because the outcome of our results would influence what platform we used in our next database server for the AnandTech Forums. The choice is simple; the AMD 760MP is the DP workstation and server platform to have. It's reliable, it's high performing and it's very flexible; everything you'd expect from an Intel based server solution, except that it's from AMD instead.

Three years ago we wouldn't be caught dead recommending an AMD based server solution. Today, we'd be crazy not to do so.