has anyone heard of any news (or gossip for that matter) as to any other mobo manufacturers making amd dual boards? im sure that they will be but it seems that tyan is the only one that has any info on their dual board.

thanks

This doesn't quite count, but I know that PC resources is involved (somehow) with the development of an 8-way quasi-NUMA architecture board, with 12 rambus channels (and yes, it makes sense for them to use it ). Othre than that......yeah, I've not heard a whole lot. AMD's been pretty tight lipped.

ASUS and Solteck are in the developmental stages of
dual AMD based boards. No words from those companies
tho.

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Serious Soldier

There's definitely more on it now Are you planning to build one of these suckers?

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ActiveTuning - Partner & Director Of Sales & Marketing

I'm thinking about it. Just have to scratch together enough
cash for the initial outlay.

I would also like to see a duallie board from iWill with the AMD
chip. Several different board makers would be nice to choose
from.

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Serious Soldier

If there were AMD duels they still would not take advantage of games right? Well why do i ask im am sure they don't....

Well, games would have to be multithreaded in such a way that the game knows to take advantage of another processor. The only game that I know of that does this (currently) is any game based off the Q3 engine (well, I know Q3 does, but I would venture a guess that Q3 engine based games can do so too....).

The only problem is that you have to use a multithreaded aware OS as well (win2k, winnt, or a *nix, or BeOS, etc). Another issue is that, from everything that I've seen, the multithreading support available in Q3 isn't that great (at least, it wasn't on an Intel based system). The reason why it actually lowered performance (well, this is mostly a guess) is because of main-memory bandwidth contention. The game (Q3) is already bandwidth limited, and having another CPU fight for some of it can actually decrease performance.

And AMD solution should be better, due to the processors having a dedicated 13-bit snoop bus (basically, this allows the CPUs to tell each other what they're working on). In most Intel architecturse, they have to go over the FSB to do this, and that means even less bandwidth is available.

That was the long answer.

Here's the short answer: Some games can take advantage of SMP, but they have to be written to do so, and not many are, and even those few that are, they can sometimes actually cause slow-downs.

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paul@pleaseohpleasedontspamme.slcentral.com
A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems -- P. Erdos