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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."
If they waste more electricity, are more noisy and increase the likelyhood for fatal accidents, count me in!
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.
While these come with the gun racks standard?
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable" - JFK
Remember what Smokey the Bear says. Only you can prevent your AMD(TM) quad-core desktop computer from starting a forest fire.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
..with jet propulsion.
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)
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
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!
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)
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.
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