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AMD upgrades multi-processing Athlons

The high-end chips are designed to let AMD sell more workstations and servers, but that market has taken a turn for the worse
Written by Matthew Broersma, Contributor

AMD has bumped up the speed of its multi-processor Athlon MP, designed for dual-processor workstations and servers. The new chip arrives as AMD warned investors that revenues for the second quarter would be 22 to 24 percent lower than expected.

The Athlon MP 2100+ running at 1.733GHz succeeds the Athlon MP 2000+, running at 1.67GHz, as AMD's fastest multi-processor chip. The processor uses the same QuantiSpeed architecture found in AMD's desktop chips, and AMD's Smart MP technology for speeding up chip-to-chip data transfer.

AMD said the chip uses a 266MHz system bus with Error Correcting Code support that can deliver 2.1GB per second per CPU of bus bandwidth in a dual-processor system.

The Athlon MP works with AMD's own chipset, called AMD-760 MPX, which features a "Multi Processor eXtended" PCI bus that is an improvement over the earlier AMD-760 chipset.

The chips are priced at $262 (£183) each in 1,000-unit quantities.

On Tuesday AMD said its earnings would be lower than predicted in March, blaming the shortfall on a weak PC market and, in particular, on weakness in areas where AMD has historically been strong. Sales of consumer notebooks and desktops in the United States and Europe, where AMD generally sells well, are both down substantially.

The company recently began to enter the server market, the target market for Athlon MP, but that market, too, has gone south, AMD said. Athlon MP is also designed for high-end workstations running software development, computer-aided design and digital content creation applications.

CNET News.com's Michael Kanellos contributed to this report.


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