Unofficial sources revealed that TYAN, probably the main partner of Advanced Micro Devices in their dual-processor servers, will soon cease to manufacture AMD760 MPX chipset based mainboards for the Athlon MP processors. The information is fully unofficial, but it is likely to be truth, since soon AMD will roll-out its Opteron processors for two-way systems that will substitute the Athlon MP chips in some time. As I read over The Inquirer, TYAN’s clients are far from being satisfied with the prices of such mainboards in addition to the fact that Intel now offers much faster Xeon processors for DP platforms. So, as you see, there are, at least, a number of reasons for TYAN to stop making the Athlon MP meant platforms.

The source reports that currently TYAN offers the Thunder S2469GN ThunderMPX mainboard, supporting Dual Athlon MP, Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, AGP Pro, 5PCI slots, up to 4GB of DDR SDRAM support and Rage XL graphics core for $378, in contrast to the S2722GNN – a dual Xeon platform, using the i7500 chipset (400MHz Quad Pumped Bus), supporting up to 8GB of DDR SDRAM, Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, 2 PCI-X and a PCI slot and Rage XL graphics for $298. If you take a look at this news-story, you will notice that Intel’s Xeon 2.40GHz (400MHz QPB) costs $224, $4 less compared to AMD’s Athlon MP 2400+. Moreover, the latter is AMD highest performing MP processor at the moment, while the Xeon 2.40GHz is one of the lowest performing Socket 603 CPU from Intel now.

In February or early March AMD plans to unveil its processors based on the Barton core. They will offer Athlon MP with 512KB L2 cache in a very short after that announcement and it is logical to assume that AMD will also finally reconsider its pricing policy in regards the Athlon MP chips. In fact, if AMD rolls-out its x86-64 processors for DP configurations in significant quantities, the latter will substitute the current Athlon MP chips easily. AMD customers will be happy, provided there are not very expensive mainboards for such CPUs.

To sum up, AMD needs to revise its Athlon MP pricing policy, since if TYAN leaves the 760MPX platform, there will be available not very lot of two-way mainboards from ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte and IWILL. As IWILL is the only provider of server platforms among these companies, AMD will be really hard to push its current Athlon MP chips with only one manufacturer of mainboards. Of course, in case AMD substitutes the present Athlon MPs with x86-64 CPUs and its partners provide enough appropriate platforms, they will hardly need to promote the K7 MPs. However, in Fall 2002 AMD unofficially said they will try to promote the Athlon MP “Barton” processor as lower-end offering for entry-level servers.