AMD finally crack SMP

Hot on the heels of our AMD Athlon "Thunderbird" review today comes the news that AMD are finally closing in on SMP support for both its Thunderbird and Duron processors! SMP of course translates as "Symmetric multiprocessing" or dual CPU support. According to American news reporter JC's Pages, the 760MP chipset will be sampled in December and motherboards could be available as soon as the first quarter of 2001! If true, the report could well be another nail in the Pentium III's coffin, just as Intel release their cC0 stepping models. Sources report that the cC0 platform is incapable of SMP, and as such they will be unable to compete on the same level. This said, sources are already stating that the Intel-published developer report stating that the cC0 stepping model will be incapable of SMP is a typo. An expensive one, too, if AMD manage to seize upon it. Meanwhile, AMD's new Lightning Data Transfer bus (or LDT for short) has received a total of 40 further sign-ups, from companies including Transmeta.