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Multiprocessor platforms are the pets of the inaugurated advanced PC user as well as an ever-growing nitch market for entry-level professional work stations and servers. After the delayed launch of the AMD MPX platform as open-source playground for all mainboard manuafacturers, we have seen the oldtimers like Tyan MSI and ASUS as AMD channel partners grabbing a substantial piece of the multi-Athlon pie. Other manufacturers like Gigabyte and EPoX are trying to penetrate this market as well. One company originating in the server market is Iwill and, after a few forays into the desktop market, Iwill appears to throw in their entire weight to come out with a rather unusual MPX mainboard, underdoggie-style. The shipping box is about the only thing that qualifies as flash and dance, the rest is like phlogiston, very hard to find but once you get it ....

Within AMD, the MP/MPX platform is probably the one area with the highest growth rate, that is, sales are approximately doubling from quarter to quarter. While it needs to be stated that this growth is still in its exponential stage and not yet a booster of AMD's overall sales, the MP and MPX platform have become a very important part of the entry and enterprise server and workstation market. Competitive pricing and the highest floating point performance that can be purchased in the sub $10k market make the dual Athlon boards the most affordable platform for high end 3D and cinematographic rendering as evidenced by legions of movies done on this exact platform in the last year.

Performance does not always equal performance. Moreover, benchmarks are often a very poor metric of performance, especially in the case of dual processor systems where the main benefit is to keep everything running smoothly regardless of how many services and applications are running in the background. If we believe in benchmarks at all, we will have to factor in a few additional things. For once, a workstation of this caliber will run with registered memory in ECC mode and by definition, this will have a noticeable impact on performance of any memory intensive application.

Iwill are focusing on multiprocessor platforms lately. The MPX2 can be operated with an ATX 2.03 or an EPS power supply and features Iwill's IPS anti-burn protection.

At the same time, performance in the application space that these systems are going into is measured mostly using the metric of uptime, meaning the ratio of the system running compared to downtimes due to necessary reboots. It really does not matter whether we are talking about webservers, file servers in mission critical applications or simply workstations in a high-paid environment where the average hour of labor exceeds the $100 barrier. To put this into a single equation: every percent of downtime in a 24/7 environment costs more than the entire acquisition price of such a system. Ironically, this is one of the main reasons why AMD had a relatively hard time to grab a foothold in this kind of environment, there is a justified clinging to the established solutions, may they be slow or outdated, as long as they keep running.

A few months ago we posted a comparative review of three of the first MPX boards from ASUS, MSI and Tyan hitting the market, outfitted at the time still with the, er, flawed first production revision of AMD's Opus south bridge. This early version of the AMD 768 I/O controller was blemished with an astronomically remote, albeit existent possibility of USB failure in certain combinations with PCI devices. Of all manufacturers, MSI were the only ones bold enough to ignore the requests of AMD and to leave everything enabled, at least for a small contingent of boards that were shipped.

While the Opus bug did somehow hurt the platform, it is in the past; the bugs have been fixed and every manufacturer has come around to re-implement the USB ports on their offerings in the MPX platform. In addition, there is an entirely new breed of MPX boards out there. EPoX and GigaByte have come out with budget solutions, but the one board that really stands out, at least in terms of its physical dimensions and some of its features is the behemoth offered by Iwill under the model code MPX2.

If there is any apology I can make to Iwill for the undue delay of this review, it is the fact that we really wanted to stress-test this board before writing anything about it. And so we did, probably more than any other board we ran through the paces here. The outcome of this testing marathon? We won't disclose the whole story in a single sentence for the simple reason that that sentence would be veeeery long. Instead we'll show the gory details one by one.

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