ATHLON HELP ME ON THIS PLZ!!!!

ATHLON HELP ME ON THIS PLZ!!!!

[Astinus]

I know i have been posting too many questions on this subject and i also
know that these athlon issues were deeply discussed some week ago.
So i went back and READ ALL the posts concerning dual athlon machines and
even chipsets! But my dought remains.

I am about to buy a dual athlon pc, a tyan's thunder k7 S2462 ( 760mp ) and
two 1800 or 1700 ahtlon MP processors.
I will buy the registered DDram supported or advised by tyan's manufacturer
as well as a good power supply and some major cooling.

My main question is:    Am i going to have any kind of problems when trying
to run a SMP kernel???
I was prety sure the problems only came with the Xps! But then i read:

"XPs and MPs are quite similar!"
"The MP technollogy is just AMD trying to take us some more money"
( and more than once i ve seen statements like these! )

Then i went on reading and realised all those problems when trying to run
the SMP kernels with the AThlon XP...... ~made me very worried!!!

At last i almost collapsed when i saw this mail:

"I have a similar system running fine.  It has a Tyan S2460, a pair of
Athlon MP 1800s, 512M (2x256) and a pair of IBM 60G drives.

I haven't seen any signs of kernel instability. However:

  1) When I first got it I had the BIOS do some very odd things; at one
  point the CMOS got cleared and then everything worked from there on
  in.  So a good CMOS clean could be in order. I had to use the Debian
  safe boot set prior to this."

The author is now running a stable system as far as i can understand but
what were those strange things that happened when he first got his machine
working???

I am FOR SÛRE a kernel newbie and i have no problem with that.
I learn fast and am quite interested in becoming expert, so the last thing i
want is a machine which i have to reboot every 2 or 3 days or even each
our... as it has been happening to some people with the XPs.
( Plz don't send me to the kernelnewbie list as someone already did cause u
can explain me these matters much better than anyone on that list ).

Can anyone explian me why almost every body, even quite big servers bought
athlon xps instead of the mp ones^??
This is an issue that concerns me too!! You see,  ~why would a big server
risk to buy a processor that may not work when the other one (mp) is suppose
to work?? Is it for the extraa dollars u have to spend on the hardware???

Am I w~rong?? Are the MPs and the XPs so similar that the problems u have
with one will be the same with the other???

I would like some opinions on this.

I never had an AMD machine but with the current performance of  this
manufacturer's material  i was willing to change intel for AMD.
What i dõn't want is to spend my cash ~in a machine that i will hate for the
rest of  its life :P.

Thank to the ones who will be willing to help me.

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO U ALL.

regards Astinus

Re: ATHLON HELP ME ON THIS PLZ!!!!

[Mike Harrold]

> 
> I know i have been posting too many questions on this subject and i also
> know that these athlon issues were deeply discussed some week ago.
> So i went back and READ ALL the posts concerning dual athlon machines and
> even chipsets! But my dought remains.
> 
> I am about to buy a dual athlon pc, a tyan's thunder k7 S2462 ( 760mp ) and
> two 1800 or 1700 ahtlon MP processors.
> I will buy the registered DDram supported or advised by tyan's manufacturer
> as well as a good power supply and some major cooling.
> 
> My main question is:    Am i going to have any kind of problems when trying
> to run a SMP kernel???

Actually, I'm interested in this as well. The only thing stopping me from
buying a dual Athlon MP is the problems I keep reading about here on lkml.
I don't want to spend the money only to have problems.

So, if anyone is running dual Athlon MPs *flawlessly*, I'd appreciate a
hardware listing (MB, Bios version, RAM type & manufacturer, etc.).

Thanks,

/Mike

Re: ATHLON HELP ME ON THIS PLZ!!!!

[Shaya Potter]

On Tue, 2002-01-01 at 16:07, Mike Harrold wrote:
> > 
> > I know i have been posting too many questions on this subject and i also
> > know that these athlon issues were deeply discussed some week ago.
> > So i went back and READ ALL the posts concerning dual athlon machines and
> > even chipsets! But my dought remains.
> > 
> > I am about to buy a dual athlon pc, a tyan's thunder k7 S2462 ( 760mp ) and
> > two 1800 or 1700 ahtlon MP processors.
> > I will buy the registered DDram supported or advised by tyan's manufacturer
> > as well as a good power supply and some major cooling.
> > 
> > My main question is:    Am i going to have any kind of problems when trying
> > to run a SMP kernel???
> 
> Actually, I'm interested in this as well. The only thing stopping me from
> buying a dual Athlon MP is the problems I keep reading about here on lkml.
> I don't want to spend the money only to have problems.
> 
> So, if anyone is running dual Athlon MPs *flawlessly*, I'd appreciate a
> hardware listing (MB, Bios version, RAM type & manufacturer, etc.).

I strongly reccomend the forums at www.2cpu.com and www.arstechnica.com

shaya

Re: ATHLON HELP ME ON THIS PLZ!!!!

[Daniel Freedman]

Hi Mike and Astinus,

On Tue, Jan 01, 2002, Mike Harrold wrote:
> > 
> > I know i have been posting too many questions on this subject and i also
> > know that these athlon issues were deeply discussed some week ago.
> > So i went back and READ ALL the posts concerning dual athlon machines and
> > even chipsets! But my dought remains.
> > 
> > I am about to buy a dual athlon pc, a tyan's thunder k7 S2462 ( 760mp ) and
> > two 1800 or 1700 ahtlon MP processors.
> > I will buy the registered DDram supported or advised by tyan's manufacturer
> > as well as a good power supply and some major cooling.
> > 
> > My main question is:    Am i going to have any kind of problems when trying
> > to run a SMP kernel???
> 
> Actually, I'm interested in this as well. The only thing stopping me from
> buying a dual Athlon MP is the problems I keep reading about here on lkml.
> I don't want to spend the money only to have problems.
> 
> So, if anyone is running dual Athlon MPs *flawlessly*, I'd appreciate a
> hardware listing (MB, Bios version, RAM type & manufacturer, etc.).

As I've mentioned before, I'm running ten dual Athlon systems with
perfect stability for the past few months, and reboots only for kernel
upgrades or power supply failures that exceeded our UPS backup supply.a

The hardware of relevance:

Tyan S2460 motherboard (though you may want to wait for Tyan S2466
(release time unknown: a month? two?) which has the 760MPX with 66MHz
64-bit PCI, the S2460 only has 64-bit 33MHz PCI)

Dual Athlon MP 1800+'s processors on some nodes and Dual Athlon MP 1.2
GHz on others (clearly never mixing the two on the same machine)

2GB of Corsair ECC/Reg. DDR2100 Ram per node (4 512MB sticks) (one
machine has 4GB of Corsair memory and works perfectly except for the
inability of the board's BIOS to address the last 400MB or so (some
type of AGP Video offset or the like.  grr...))

BIOS version is Tyan's 1.03, but I never had problems with the initial
1.02 other than the fact that it didn't POST with headless nodes (no
video cards) which was annoying...

Can't see how much else matters, but if you're interested:

Non-diskless machines are used as workstations and also have IBM 60GXP
(40GB) drive and ATI xPERT 2000 video cards.

Power supplies in workstations are Antec 400 watt supplies bundled
with the Antec sx1040.  PSU's in the nodes are Zippy Emacs
P2U-6300P's.

NIC's are Intel EEPro 100+ management adapters (PILA8460B).



These machines get their memory and FPU systems beat on quite hard,
from my point of view, as they run intensive physics calculations
(specifically, DFT electronic structure calculations) 24/7.  So my
claims to their stability are not based upon non-activity of the
machines.  Obviously, YMMV...




Separately...

On Tue, Jan 01, 2002, Astinus wrote:
> Can anyone explian me why almost every body, even quite big servers bought
> athlon xps instead of the mp ones^??
> This is an issue that concerns me too!! You see,  ~why would a big server
> risk to buy a processor that may not work when the other one (mp) is suppose
> to work?? Is it for the extraa dollars u have to spend on the hardware???

I would be VERY suprised if any significant portion of those running
"big servers" bought XP's instead of MP's for dual use.  I mainly
think it's an enthusiast thing, which is fine...  You have to make
your own tradeoffs between cost/assurances for your specific use.

> Am I w~rong?? Are the MPs and the XPs so similar that the problems u have
> with one will be the same with the other???
>
> I would like some opinions on this.

IMHO, I would NOT buy XP to use in a dual configuration, but that's
only because I value the assurance of proper SMP operation to be worth
the extra ~$100 per CPU ($200 per machine), and not because there are
not reports of dual XP's working (but working how? what about at
higher loads? with more memory?  etc...)

> I never had an AMD machine but with the current performance of  this
> manufacturer's material  i was willing to change intel for AMD.
> What i don't want is to spend my cash ~in a machine that i will hate for the
> rest of  its life :P.

I think you'll enjoy the Athon MP platform very much (maybe even more
with new 760MPX chipset).


HTH and take care,

Daniel

-- 
Daniel A. Freedman
Laboratory for Atomic and Solid State Physics
Department of Physics
Cornell University

Re: ATHLON HELP ME ON THIS PLZ!!!!

[Brian]

On Tuesday 01 January 2002 04:07 pm, Mike Harrold wrote:
> Actually, I'm interested in this as well. The only thing stopping me
> from buying a dual Athlon MP is the problems I keep reading about here
> on lkml. I don't want to spend the money only to have problems.
>
> So, if anyone is running dual Athlon MPs *flawlessly*, I'd appreciate a
> hardware listing (MB, Bios version, RAM type & manufacturer, etc.).

We have 8 running dual-Athlons which are basically Einux 1200s 
(http://www.einux.com/A1200.html).  We have our first pair of MP1700-based 
systems going in this week, so I can't say much about those yet.

We had some trouble with a couple of bad boards from Tyan's first batch or 
so.  Also, more than 2 Kentron 256MB modules didn't work well together.  
Those first couple weeks were rough, but we switched to 512MB modules and 
they have been rock solid ever since.

The XP processors may or may not work, but I would have a tough time 
justifying it to customers if we had system problems from us cheaping out 
on unsupported configs.

	-- Brian

Re: ATHLON HELP ME ON THIS PLZ!!!!

[Andre Hedrick]

Well I have a pair and one is an unreleased chipset version I develop a
lot of code on.

Recall the RAID 0 report of 109MB/sec writing and 167MB/sec reading, well
that was generated on a dual athlon.  Mind the fact these are certified
boards from AMD and are reference boards.

	http://www.linux-ide.org/.athy/athlonpass.jpg

This is the authentication tag for one of the referrence boards used for
the creation of the Tyan Board.  No I can not disclose much more than
this, but the original Tyan Board that was a cadillac with all the options
is the preferred board.  The BIOS I have is the Tyan 2.06a but that one
may be gone.

So as for who makes the best board for dual athlon, AMD; however, those
are hard to come by regardless.

Oh and if you would like a tool suite to test you systems for stablity,
I will be happy to license for a fee so that you can make your customers
more confident about the product.

Regards,

Andre Hedrick
CEO/President, LAD Storage Consulting Group
Linux ATA Development
Linux Disk Certification Project

On Tue, 1 Jan 2002, Brian wrote:

> On Tuesday 01 January 2002 04:07 pm, Mike Harrold wrote:
> > Actually, I'm interested in this as well. The only thing stopping me
> > from buying a dual Athlon MP is the problems I keep reading about here
> > on lkml. I don't want to spend the money only to have problems.
> >
> > So, if anyone is running dual Athlon MPs *flawlessly*, I'd appreciate a
> > hardware listing (MB, Bios version, RAM type & manufacturer, etc.).
> 
> We have 8 running dual-Athlons which are basically Einux 1200s 
> (http://www.einux.com/A1200.html).  We have our first pair of MP1700-based 
> systems going in this week, so I can't say much about those yet.
> 
> We had some trouble with a couple of bad boards from Tyan's first batch or 
> so.  Also, more than 2 Kentron 256MB modules didn't work well together.  
> Those first couple weeks were rough, but we switched to 512MB modules and 
> they have been rock solid ever since.
> 
> The XP processors may or may not work, but I would have a tough time 
> justifying it to customers if we had system problems from us cheaping out 
> on unsupported configs.

Re: ATHLON HELP ME ON THIS PLZ!!!!

[Andreas Bombe]

On Tue, Jan 01, 2002 at 07:42:09PM -0000, Astinus wrote:
> Can anyone explian me why almost every body, even quite big servers bought
> athlon xps instead of the mp ones^??
> This is an issue that concerns me too!! You see,  ~why would a big server
> risk to buy a processor that may not work when the other one (mp) is suppose
> to work?? Is it for the extraa dollars u have to spend on the hardware???
> 
> Am I w~rong?? Are the MPs and the XPs so similar that the problems u have
> with one will be the same with the other???

They are in fact the same, except for the packaging (well, one says "XP"
the other says "MP") and possibly some ID number inside.

The difference is that MPs are tested by AMD for SMP capability and
guaranteed to work (ie. if they don't work you can have it replaced).
As I detailed in another mail, XPs can basically be of three types:

1) failed MP test, sold as XP
2) not tested for MP since market demands more XPs
3) passed MP test, but market demands more XPs

XPs are cheaper than MPs so people try those in SMP configs in the hope
that there are many type 3 XPs or that they get type 2 XPs that would
have passed the MP test.

It's impossible to tell which type you actually got, so the XPs in SMP
are always one of the main suspects if there is a problem.  In short,
you won't have those (CPU specific) problems with MPs.  If it's other
problems (chipset, for example) they could still appear.

-- 
Andreas Bombe <bombe@informatik.tu-muenchen.de>    DSA key 0x04880A44