AMD 760MP & Athlon MP - Dual Processor Heaven

Tyan: Still the King

When AMD launched the Athlon processor in 1999, they picked a handful of motherboard manufacturers to be their launch partners.  These partners included manufacturers like FIC and Gigabyte and it was their duty to make sure that the Athlon processor had motherboards to run on upon its release.  For the 760MP chipset, AMD decided to pick one and only one motherboard manufacturer to deliver a motherboard to the market.  And of course, they picked the one motherboard manufacturer that has always prided themselves on producing server motherboards: Tyan.

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Tyan essentially has the exclusive on the AMD 760MP release, meaning that you won’t see motherboards from another manufacturer until the end of this year at the earliest.  There are a few reasons for this; for one, AMD wanted someone very experienced in building server motherboards to handle the task.  You already know the requirements for a server platform, and you can also believe that Tyan is also very well versed in those requirements. 

Being the only 760MP motherboard manufacturer isn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially when you realize that the Tyan Thunder K7 is quite possibly the most feature filled motherboard we have ever seen in our four years of reviewing motherboards. 

The Thunder K7 is actually the reference design for AMD’s 760MP platform, which AMD internally refers to as the Guinness platform.  The features are as follows:

-         2 - Socket-A Interfaces (100MHz/133MHz DDR FSB)

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-         4 - 45 degree angled DDR SDRAM DIMM slots

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-         5 – 64-bit/33MHz PCI slots (backwards compatible with 32-bit/33MHz PCI devices)
-         1 – AGP Pro110 slot delivering a maximum of 110W of power to AGP Pro110 cards
-         1 – onboard ATI RageXL graphics
-         1 – Adaptec 7899W dual channel Ultra160 SCSI controller
-         2 – onboard 3Com 10/100 Ethernet controllers

There are a number of interesting points about the motherboard’s feature set.  First of all, the angled memory slots allow the Thunder K7 to be used in a 1U server case.  This is a huge accomplishment since rack space can be very expensive if you have quite a few servers.  Designing a 1U server around a dual Athlon MP Thunder K7 platform requires special cooling and power to be implemented, since there isn’t enough space for regular heatsinks to be mounted in the case, but it is possible.  In the near future, you will see systems from at least one manufacturer produced in a 1U form factor (approximately 2” high).