Will dual Athlons rule?

Though I'm not intending to stir things up, does anyone have any info on the performance of dual Athlon systems? I know they're on the way, but does anyone know if the systems will be limited to only certain types of Athlon (e.g., only the C variants onwards).

It occured to me that if multi-processor threading could be executed in hardware and not software, then this would put serious dents into the high-end processors, where people could run 2 Durons for a fraction of the cost of an Athlon 1.6Ghz (when it comes along), as was predicted with the dual Celeron board a couple of years ago. The only reason you couldn't really do it then was a shortage of parts, but more importantly, you needed software that was written for dual processor systems, which was pretty much limited to rendering packages, etc., and not the mainstream market. Gamers in particular (as the people who spend the most on PCs generally) would suddenly see their value for money go through the roof.

I know that the PIII does this already, but only with the right OS and software, and except for QuakeII & III (which doesn't seem to benefit much from having an extra CPU), no games or general home-user apps fit into this category.

I know it's a bit chicken & egg scenario (no h/ware, then why write the software that way), but thought it'd be an interesting discussion as I don't remember seeing a topic on this in a while.

Cheers

Dan

My father had it, I have it, and .... my sister has it.

I don't know how well the AMD 760MP systems are working out, but I'd imagine they would have to rock. I mean single CPU Athlon systems do, so dual would be even better.

Of course though, this depends entirely on having an OS that supports it, and running multi-threaded applications. And since the vast majority of software is single-threaded, there isn't much point for the average user.

And since making multi-threaded applications is often very painful and can even sometimes slow software down when it's run on a single CPU system, it isn't likely that this would ever change.

There just isn't incentive enough to go through the effort of writing a program as multi-threaded instead of single-threaded for most programmers/software companies to even consider it. Some do though. But those are usually very expensive products that the average person doesn't use.

You're not likely ever going to see hardware that can take a single-threaded application and run it on multiple-CPUs though. Thread synchronization makes that next to impossible.

Still, I personally would love to have a dual Athlon running at home. I know that I would get use out of two processors.

-I no longer talk to stupid people. They just aren't worth taking the time to talk to.

A program was recently developed at Los Alamos that uses one program single threaded and divides it up among many processors. There was an article about it in last monthe Comp Graphics World.

Dan
I may be wrong but there would be problems with each processor clobering each other. There wouldent be a way of keeping memory addressing (assigned by the software) seperate unless the memory was only accesable by one processor wich is like having seperate machines defeating the purpose.
Anim88tor