AMD Athlon MP processor 2400+ delivers increased performance

EDP Weekly's IT Monitor, Dec 16, 2002

AMD (NYSE:AMD) has introduced the AMD Athlon MP processor 2400 , designed for enterprises and research institutes that rely on software applications that require intense computing power. The AMD Athlon MP processor 2400 enables business customers and the scientific community to achieve more work in less time through its superior x86 processor architecture, including state-of-the-art floating-point capability for intense number crunching.

"AMD is focused on delivering processor innovations to help meet our customers' business and research computing needs," said Marty Seyer, AMD vice president, CPG's server business segment. "With the AMD Athlon MP processor and its superior floating point capability, leading enterprises and research institutes can get the high performance they need to stay in front of their computing requirements."

AMD Athlon MP processor-based servers can be combined via high-speed interconnect technologies to create powerful clusters that bring commercial customers and research institutes increased computing capabilities. AMD Athlon MP processors provide the powerhouse for high-end workstations running applications that benefit from AMD's impressive floating-point capabilities. AMD Athlon MP processors are often the processor of choice for high performance computing (HPC) solutions for government and university research, life sciences, geophysics, automotive, aerospace and entertainment industry customers.

The Tokyo Institute of Technology (TITECH) has one of several AMD Athlon MP processor-based supercomputers on the TOP500 Supercomputer list. "We have been able to demonstrate that a single university lab can achieve terascale performance within the restrictions of a typical university lab budget," said Dr. Satoshi Matsuoka, professor of Global Scientific Information and Computer Center at TITECH. "AMD Athlon MP processors, known for tremendous floating point capability that compute-intense applications require, are an important part of that equation. TITECH uses its AMD Athlon MP processor-based system for building a large grid computing infrastructure, which is in turn used for various high-end applications such as terascale data processing in high-energy physics, advanced bioinformatics, large scale numerical optimizations, etc."

Systems featuring the AMD Athlon MP processor 2400 are expected to be available immediately from 47 system builders worldwide. The AMD Athlon MP processor 2400 is priced at $228 in 1,000-unit quantities.

The AMD Athlon MP processor is an x86 processor designed for high-performance multiprocessing servers and workstations.

Leading corporations use AMD Athlon MP processors to increase productivity in areas such as oil and gas exploration, Web-hosting services and motion picture rendering. In addition, many of the world's most prestigious universities use AMD Athlon MP processors in super clusters for compute-intensive research applications.

A key advantage of AMD's multiprocessing platform is Smart MP technology, which greatly enhances overall platform performance by increasing data movement between the two CPUs, chipset and memory system. Smart MP technology features dual point-to-point, high-speed 266MHz system buses with Error Correcting Code (ECC) support designed 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.

The AMD Athlon MP processor features the patented QuantiSpeed architecture, which includes a high performance full-speed cache with hardware data pre-fetch, a fully pipelined superscalar floating point engine, and an exclusive L2 Translation Look-aside Buffer (TLB). The processor also incorporates 3DNow! Professional technology, which has 51 new instructions that extend AMD's 3DNow! technology, enabling smoother, richer and more lifelike images, more precise digital audio and an enriched Internet experience.

The AMD Athlon MP processor is compatible with AMD's stable Socket A infrastructure, and supports DDR memory technology. It is manufactured using AMD's 0.13-micron copper process technology in Fab 30 in Dresden, Germany.