From LQWiki
Multi-processor is simply an adjective meaning a computer with more than one CPU.
Supercomputers and mainframes tend to be multi-processor. Desktop chips such as Athlon and Pentium tend not to support multi-processor configurations. AMD Athlon MP and Intel Xeon are designed with this in mind. When used in pairs, these chips support a very basic kind of multi-processing called SMP - symmetric multi-processing.
In order to benefit from using a multi-processor computer with Linux, one must use a kernel that has been compiled with SMP enabled. There is no significant performance decrease in using SMP kernel if you only have one CPU, but a significant increase if you have two.
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