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."

Comments

4x4?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Its funny that this was mentioned....

[bunbuntheminilop]

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

Yeah, but ....

[texaport]

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!

Re:Sounds neat

[vertinox]

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...