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

Know for games to catch up

[Kesch]

Even though every uber-gamer is gonna need a 4x4 for bragging rights and IPE(Imaginary Penis Enlargement), it won't be that much of an upgrade for hardcore gaming until more games break out of the single-threaded event loop. Multiple processors only work on multiple threads.

I hear rumors that people use processing power for other things, but I think those are just myths. (Actually I just started to work for a high-performance computing group and they'll probably be excited by the new AMD offerings)