AMD Athlon MP (not XP) Processors

'Twas only last week that AMD unveiled its new Athlon XP processors, along with the interesting new True Performance Initiative, which is supposed to rate CPUs on, well, true performance rather than clock speed. This week, in the onslaught of AMD processors, we are being introduced to the AMD Athlon MP 1800+, 1600+ and 1500+ processors for multiprocessing servers and workstations. The MP processors, like the XPs, feature AMD's QuantiSpeed architecture with the addition of the company's Smart MP technology. AMD says that benchmarks for single and dual processor-based platforms powered by AMD Athlon MP processors exhibit performance advantages over "similarly-configured single and dual processor-based platforms powered by competitive processors operating at certain higher frequencies," and goes as far as saying that a workstation based on a dual 1.53GHz AMD Athlon MP processor 1800+ outperforms a similarly-configured workstation based on a dual 1.7GHz Intel Xeon processor by up to 23 percent on various application benchmarks, such as High-end Microstation, SoftImage XSI, and Alias Wavefront/Maya.

Systems featuring the AMD Athlon MP processors are expected to be available from computer manufacturers in the U.S., Europe, Japan, and Asia-Pacific regions. The MP 1800+, 1600+ and 1500+ processors are priced at $302, $210 and $180, respectively, in 1,000-unit quantities. AMD says that Smart MP technology is a key performance factor for multiprocessor systems because it increases data movement between the two CPUs, chipset, and memory systems. Smart MP technology features dual point-to-point, 266MHz system buses with Error Correcting Code (ECC) support that is said to provide up to 2.1GB per second per CPU of bus bandwidth in a dual-processor system. Smart MP technology also has an optimized Modified Owner Exclusive Shared Invalid (MOESI) cache coherency protocol that manages data and memory traffic in a multiprocessing environment. It seems a bit odd that the company would be using the XP naming scheme on processors designed for workstations and servers. If there's one group that probably doesn't need a simpler performance metric like the yet-to-be-defined True Performance Initiative (along with names that don't denote processor speed in MHz), it's probably users and implementers of dualie systems. Here, AMD probably could have just stuck with a MHz designation and let folks do the homework on benchmarks for own their specific application.