having been a smp freak for about 4 years now, i can say its great, but not without its drawbacks. When i first statred, the only OS that you could use was windows NT 4, which for me meant not much gaming, and limited hardware support. So i ended up dual booting to win 98 when i needed to use my:
1. scanner
2. modem (no modem drivers for my modem under nt4)
3. joystick
or to play most games i played at the time
Since windows 2000 was released, this has become a non-issue and 98 got the boot
Drawbacks?
1. more heat
2. more noise
3. bigger case needed
4. more expensive motherboards + one more processor to buy
5. possibly larger power supply needed
6. most sound cards dont work properly in a 2 CPU machine due to drivers not taking affinity to one processor, its complicated
7. no win 9x OS support for 2 cpu machines (it works, but you waste a processor)
8. most apps are not multithreaded and dont take full advantage of SMP, but it reduces your OS overhead, so there is some inherent advantages
That said, i personally dont like the AMD MP platform, it is riddled with bugs and incompatibilities, all one needs to do is check the
www.2cpu.com forum for a gague of the problems with these things. Intel has been doing this a long time and i never had any issues with intel dual cpu systems at all. however they are more expensive. But you get what you pay for and if you ask me, its a superior platform