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4x4 Chips, Opening AMD's Architecture

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the alot-to-like-here dept.

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."

8 of 229 comments (clear)

  1. 4x4? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If you're combining two dual core chips, wouldn't that be 2x2? Or even 2x4 (or 4x2), but 4x4? That makes no sense. Looks like they're using the Chewbaca marketing technique.

    1. Re:4x4? by darkmeridian · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Think of a 4 X 4 truck; it does not have sixteen wheels. "X" can be used to represent concepts other than multiplication, you know?

      --
      A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
  2. Its funny that this was mentioned.... by bunbuntheminilop · · Score: 3, Insightful

    As I just noticed last night that the newer kernels support CPU hotplugging.

  3. Yeah, but .... by texaport · · Score: 5, Insightful
    open for plugging in of 3rd party co-processors directly on the processor bus.

    AMD won't happen to produce any of these "3rd party co-processors" will they?

    I haven't been this excited since Intel started selling 386SX chips that allowed us
    to buy Cyrix (or Intel) math coprocessors for twice what a non-crippled DX cost!

  4. Poor Article by clump · · Score: 2, Insightful
    This article lacked any real substance and was as vague as possible.
    It also unveiled its new Socket 4x4 motherboard interface, which will let enthusiasts put two dual-core CPUs on a single motherboard.

    What does that mean? A motherboard with 2 processor slots? A motherboard that accepts two dual-core processors? We've had both, and for a while.

    I wish online editors wouldn't publish meaningless articles like this, and I wish sites wouldn't link to them.
  5. Re:Sounds neat by vertinox · · Score: 4, Insightful

    As a sysadmin, this sounds neat -- but I haven't seen any computing environments that need that kind of horsepower yet.

    I take it you don't do any scientific calculations or physics modeling at your place of work.

    And I assume that you don't do 3d animation or video editing either?

    Or mabye mass amounts of OCR, Photoshop, or anything else that puts CPU usage at 100%

    Sure 90% of the computer market doesn't need this, but the other 10% is willing to shell out the big bucks to be the early adopters. Eventually this will be passed down to the rest of the 90% when the next big thing comes along.

    Oh and don't forget the gamers...

    --
    "I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
    -Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
  6. Re:Smokey the Bear says... by Joe+The+Dragon · · Score: 2, Insightful

    and remember that you can't use intel quad-core systems as they can get a lot hotter.

  7. CORE ARCH K8, this is shenanigans by Superfarstucker · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The heyday AMD has been having with Intel and their nutbust architecture is coming to an end, mid-July. Picture this, Intel is going to blow out the price floor on AMD and offer better performance, clock per clock, in addition to outclocking the K8 by a healthy margin (~20%). the T6600, an low-end chip is proving to outperform the FX-62 (AMD's bad dog) in pretty much every category worth noting, has full support for X86-64, and has a lower TDP. Comparing price is a joke, the T6600 is going to retail for ~300 USD and the FX-62 is ~900-1000 USD.

    ThinGs actually look quite bleak for AMD right now. Intel has hemorrhaged hundreds of Engineering Samples to enthusiast circles and it has been independently confirmed. This isn't just "hype", barring some unforseen miracle, AMD will find themselves in the same position relative to Intel they were a decade ago.

    Anybody with half a brain knows this is just mindless PR, most games gain nothing from dual-core processors as it is, aside from driver-level multithreading. The latency between physical cores is such that a SMP system is worthless for loads which are not embarrasingly parallel. AMD should be embarrased they're even trying to sell this crap.

    I've exclusively used AMD processors since the 'thunderbird, i.e. K7., Arstechnica did an overview of the new Core architecture recently, and it is a good primer on what is different. http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/core.ar s for performance comparisons, see: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1970194 ,00.asp, http://www.xtremesystems.com/index.php.