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4x4 Chips, Opening AMD's Architecture
Nom du Keyboard writes "Once upon a time open slots in a PC that anyone could build a card for were a good idea. PCs with them sold better than PCs without them. Now AMD is proposing another new socket that will be open for plugging in of 3rd party co-processors directly on the processor bus." They've also announced a 4x4 chipset, meant to counter Intel's Core 2 Duo chips. From the article: "Socket 4x4 will have a more immediately impact. Set for a release in the latter half of this year, it essentially lets you combine two dual-core Athlon 64 X2 or Athlon 64 FX chips to create a quad-core desktop PC now ... AMD made the point that Socket 4x4 also provides a more flexible upgrade path for a single motherboard system by letting you start with one chip and add another later on. AMD didn't talk pricing, but you can bet neither the Socket 4x4 motherboards, nor systems that use it to include two dual-core CPUs will be cheap."
It's not a new socket, it's two Socket AM2s next to each other which accept standard AM2 processors such as the X2, which have a coherent HT link enabled on them for this use.
It's consumer version of a dual-processor Opteron motherboard, with a specific socket layout and memory system that's more directed at consumers. AMD will support this in 2007 with 4x4+ (2 quad-core processors on AM2) and in 2008 with 4x4++, whatever that may be.
These motherboards will also support two x16 PCIe graphics card slots, which if you configured using quad-SLI gives you the other 4. 4 CPU cores, 4 GPU cores.
It's mostly marketing to keep the high end benchmarks in AMD's hands, and thus the kudos, and then further sales.
Quite clear really, although I'm confused as to why AMD didn't go the MCM route on a single socket, like the Pentium D and the upcoming Kentsfield processors from Intel.