Introduction

When AMD released the first Athlon processor in August 1999 , we were already told that its point-to-point processor bus, Alpha's EV6, supports multi processor configuration. It took almost two years however, until AMD finally released a chipset that would support more than one Athlon processor. Today AMD releases the AMD760MP chipset, which supports two AthlonMP processors, which are not based on the well-known Thunderbird core, but on the new Palomino core, which has recently been released as a mobile version. Therefore, another AMD-product is being launched today as well, the new AthlonMP processor.

Due to significant time constraints because of Computex2001 and because AMD was unable to provide sufficient information to me on time, this article will be shorter and less detailed than what you are used to as a Tom's Hardware Guide reader. I had to make a decision about which product I consider more important and I decided for NVIDIA's ground breaking nForce chipset. Don't be too disappointed though. I have still benchmarked AMD760MP as well as AthlonMP for four days without a break and can provide you with a rather large amount of benchmark data, including some performance evaluation of single Palomino in comparison to single Thunderbird. You will simply have to do without the usual technical in-depth information. I will provide this information next week once Computex2001 is over.