AMD Athlon MP 2200+ Server Roundup - September 2002

Final Words

Although this is by no means a conclusive roundup of Athlon MP servers, the fact that there are many more available than the six compared here today does speak highly for the adoption of the Athlon MP platform. Unfortunately the success of the Athlon MP has been limited to the smaller manufacturers as you won't find any tier-one OEMs using the platform. Kudos to the manufacturers included in this roundup as well as the others that have seen the potential of the Athlon MP and have already adopted it into their solutions, however it may end up being Hammer that is the first real success on the server end for AMD. With a processor and platform that are clearly designed for the server market, it will be even more difficult for manufacturers to resist the temptation of Hammer provided that it can deliver as expected.

As far as purchasing a server today, the Athlon MP is as viable of a solution as it was when we first made the switch. We've been running Athlon CPUs as servers ever since the Thunderbird core was released and the platform has given us nothing to complain about. Now with Tyan making dedicated motherboards, there's even less of a reason avoid adopting AMD's Athlon MP. The price-to-performance ratio that AMD currently offers is quite impressive as we've already made clear in our performance investigations in the past.

In terms of choosing a 1U or 2U Athlon MP solution, the decision ultimately comes down to your particular needs. We didn't have enough solutions present in this roundup to bestow our Editors Choice award upon any of these servers, but we can provide some pointers.

Racksaver's 1U solution is perfect for a very niche segment where the focus is on low-cost clustering rather than features such as removable drive bays and expansion. Appro's 1124 has been improved since we first adopted the platform and emerges as one of the strongest 1U Athlon MP solutions we've encountered to date, with its ease of accessibility being a key advantage over the competition.

In the 2U realm Elite PC held the slight advantage over CCSI's system although the redundant power supplies of CCSI's solution are very attractive for mission critical environments where there is no server-level redundancy (e.g. multiple redundant servers handling the same task with failover support).

With only one 4U system present in the roundup we can't make any real conclusions about the 4U Athlon MP market, although you can expect most 4U solutions to very closely mirror Monarch's offering in design and implementation.