Dual Athon motherboard?

[APV_SAV 0]

Anyone know if there are plans for this board?

[Skywise 0]

AMD says unofficially the chipset will be available 4th quarter. This means we probably won't see a board for sale until maybe early next year.

[APV_SAV 0]

If that is true it will be very good because it will be time for me to upgrade my abit bp6 366@550 next year. I love to have amd dual setup.

[rustE 0]

Just remember that only multi-threaded applications and true multi-tasking environments benefit from multiple processors. I was dissapointed when I got a dual CPU motherboard and found this out.

If you are a high end workstation user who has to render or compile while working with other applications you might benefit. If you are a gamer and you play only quake3 all of the time, you might benefit, If not the cost of the Board and the second processor will probably not be justified. I thought it sounded like a great idea until I tried it. If you are a gamer the best thing you could do is spend double the money on a **** hot athlon or one of the new thunderbird processors.

[HarU 0]

New thunderbird Processors??? are they AMD??? Where can i find them??? Where can i find specs?? thx.

[Super Fly 0]

The thunderbird is amd's on-die cache, .18 micron, copper interconnect dream machine...

[Super Fly 0]

Oh, and I thought I would add my 2 cents to the smp debate...if you like to try a lot of stuff with the comp, I would highly recommend it. I just finished capturing a 120 minute movie to the hard drive while compressing the video 50:1 on the fly and compressing the audio to mp3 simultaneously. The thing was running both cpus near the redline the whole time. Lots of things that aren't totally multi-threaded are at least partially so. And any two apps run simultaneously will take advantage of both procs...I am never going back to the single processor life!

[rustE 0]

In your case the cost of the second processor is definetly justified. But if you just want a speed machine for games - Like I used to when I was young and stupid you won't see a speed increase with dual processors. Hopefully we will see alot more games written on the quake3 engine (as well as some new engines in development)so we do see speed increases on Dual CPU systems.

I still believe we need to move onto another generation of the windows operating system before you can realistically mix the use of Dual CPU's and game's - Anyone know anything about windows Millenium edition and SMP???

[rustE 0]

I guess your video compression and mp3 compression were running seperate sub-system compilation programs?? In that case 4X CPU's would have rocked !!

[Super Fly 0]

I really don't know what was going on when I compressed that movie. I was using Gej's Divx (unrelated to the defunct dvd-esque standard) hacked mpeg4 codec, which, if anyone has used it for recompressing ripped dvds is generally pretty slow...like 3x real time. When I use a program like flask mpeg to recompress an mpeg2 movie, the divx compressor runs one cpu at 100% while the other is at about 15-20% for the mp3 encoding. In task manager, this looks like ~65% cpu usage +/- 10% depending on the complexity of the scene (if the mpeg4 does less work, more audio data to the mp3 audio compressor...) But when I was using my capture card taking video from the vcr the cpu utilization went anywhere from 45% to 100% of both cpus. Perhaps the video for windows ran two copies of the compressor and sent frames to each one? I really don't know. It worked, though, and I am guessing it would take a 1.1ghz cpu to do the same job (I am running 2x366@550s). The other weird thing is that if I use virtual dub to capture and use it's internal capture routines, it can't keep up. Ordinarily I would figure that its internal routines are less efficient or that it was only using one cpu for the video encoding. The problem with this is that virtual dub still runs both cpus at the redline for significant periods of time, and the quality of the video is much better. What I don't get is, when I use the video for windows method, the quality is lower, showing a lot more mpeg artifacts regardless of the bitrate I use for the codec. If the codec is doing MORE work to compress the video than when I use virtual dub, why on earth can that keep up but virtual dub can't? The only way I can get virtual dub to do it in real time is only capturing about 10 fps where I could easily get 24 fps with video for windows. I would like to see it done on a 4-way smp setup to see just what kind of cpu power the thing is capable of using...

[Skywise 0]

ME still uses the 9X core, so no SMP support...