With the development of the 760MP chipset, and the specifically designed Athlon MP processor with SMP capability, AMD plans to step into the SMP high end market. The AMD 760MP chipset will support 4GB of memory and will utilize two 266MHz system busses. The PCI bus will be increased to 66MHz. The single processor Palomino processors will be out later this year, but the specially designed multi processor units are being introduced and released today. I need to emphasize that you cannot just buy two Palominos and put them on a dual processor board, you must have the Athlon MP chips specifically engineered for multi processing.
Symmetric multiprocessing allows one system to use multiple processors.
This is especially useful in the server market where servers regularly run multiple programs. Also, programs can be designed to take advantage of multi processors. Programs where heavy calculations are done are primary users of this technology. This was why I built my Dual processor system in the first place. The SMP code in F4 is less than clean.