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AMD 4x4 Quad Father, Quad Core CPU Details Emerge
JiminyDigits writes "AMD recently
revealed a few more details of their upcoming quad-core platform
architecture called 4X4. With CPU bundles affectionately dubbed 'Quad
Father,' AMD is taking advantage of the inherent benefits of their
HyperTransport interconnect technology to directly connect a pair of dual Athlon
64 desktop chips together with system memory. Details here show
a dual socket motherboard that support a whopping 12 SATA connections, four
X16 PCI Express slots (x16,x8,x16,x8 configuration) and few other bells and
whistles. Supposedly Quad Father kits will come with matched CPUs from
2.6GHz up to 3GHz."
Hey, it had to be said.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
And this just about meets the minimum specs for Vista..
-DaMouse
Ok, I know I don't understand PCI Express, but isn't that 2*x16, and 2*x8? Yeah, it's 48 PCI-Express lanes, according to the page.. but saying that there's 4 x16 ports is a bit confusing, is it not?
They could call it a "Double Double". Tim Hortons is everywhere, now, right?
or did that article suck?
my text editor will just fly. I can't wait to spend shitloads of cash on this.
"2.6GHz up to 3.0GHz"
Which means it will cost $1000-$2000 just for CPUs and motherboard. AMD's and Intel's quad cores will cost a grand also, which limits all of this to people with more money than sense.
If they're going to allow dual processors, why not let people use the $150 2.0GHz dual cores? Then the whole thing will come in under $500 and have much wider appeal.
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
At AMD HQ
AMD PR Rep: The chips have four cores. Look, right across the board, four, four, four and...
Tech Columnist: Oh, I see. And most chips go up to two?
AMD PR Rep:: Exactly.
Tech Columnist: Does that mean it's more powerful? Is it more powerful?
AMD PR Rep:: Well, it's two more powerful , isn't it? It's not two. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing games with two. You're on two here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on two on your PC. Where can you go from there? Where?
Tech Columnist: I don't know.
AMD PR Rep:: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?
Tech Columnist: Put it up to four.
AMD PR Rep:: Eleven. Exactly. Two better.
Tech Columnist: Why don't you just have two and make them a little more powerful?
AMD PR Rep:: [pause] These have four cores.
Something tells me that the follow up to the quad core processor isn't going to contain five cores. Call it a "funny feeling." For those of us needing an upgrade or a new PC now or very soon, it would have been nice for the article to mention some dates as to when we can expect this new hardware. I just don't think it would sit well with me if I went for a dual core and then something like this suddenly appeared on the market. I'm also not thrilled about going with Intel even though my last five PCs have been Intel processor-based. I'm anxious to see what all the AMD fuss is about, but I will buy from Intel if they have the fastest processor at the time of my purchase.
They trying to say that all 4 cores get traction or something?
That aside the dual x16 PCI express Mobo looks sweet. I can finally have my triple headed, neigh, quad head display! Note that a quad cpu quad display setup might be useful for MMO gold farmers... they could have one machine running 4 bots unencumbered and have the ability to monitor all 4 at the same time...
Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
I fully expect Intel to make a 2-1/2 core CPU called the Dual-Core-3 and a 3 core called the Dual-Core-4.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
four cores, or four cores that each contain four cores, or is this some stupid car analogy?
With two CPU chips with 2 cores each, shouldn't that be called "2X2"?
Hey, with 2 microprocessors, can they still be called "Central Processing Units", when each is "offcenter" to the other?
--
make install -not war
After reading the article, I didn't see anything about a quad core CPU. Quad Father simply seems to be a dual cpu board with dual-core CPUs in it. That has been possible all along, no?
_|= <---Joke
o
-|- <---You
/ \
(the joke looks like a chair because it was originally a Steve Ballmer joke)
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
I'm just glad that my Dad wasn't a 4x4 Quad Father, or my Mom would have died during conception.
I don't trust atoms -- they make up stuff.
AMD is pushing multitasking, a model of parallel processing that will never do desktop users much good beyond a small handful of processors. (Yes I know you currently have 57 processes running, and no that does not mean you'd benefit from 57 processors). If AMD presents these silly examples like being able to play two instances of a video game simultaneously, nobody will see any value. Instead, AMD (and for that matter Intel) should be doing all they can to promote fine-grained parallelism so individual applications can easily harness multicore chips without a huge extra developer burden. All too often I am sitting waiting for a job and my CPU utilization is only 50% because the app can't use both cores. (Come on, where's dual-core gzip?) You can say it isn't the chipmakers' problem, but if it prevents me from needing their products, it is their problem.
I upgraded from Socket A to Socket AM2 this summer with 4x4 in mind, but now they say it's only being supported on socket 1207. I bought a nice 150$ 3800X2 planning on saving up and getting another one with this new 4x4 I have been hearing about for a while. They keep saying things are future proof, yet they go and change the socket type and then make it so you can only buy the top-end cpus for it to work. Where is the AMD of socket 939 when they had everything from the low-end to the high end totally covered. 4x4 just looks like they are taking their server/workstation tactics and trying to apply it to gamers.
Is it just me, or are processors with cores going to become like gilette razors with razorblades?
I thought AMD was bragging about how their qaud-core CPUs were going to be "native," unlike Intel's which were going to just be two dual-core CPUs on one die? Or is this 4x4 platform not meant to be their real quad-core solutions, just an interim "hack" until the quad-cores come out in 2007?
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these! :)
Multitasking on *nux has worked fine since the 70s. Threading has been evolving on *nux since the 1980s and there is no shortage of threading support in that world.
The problem is with Windows and its tireless efforts to fill memory with dirty pages that get flushed at the most inconvenient times. Lots of CPU-intensive Windows applications support multithreading. It's not as if multiple CPUs are a new thing in desktop PCs. The old thing is the crappy NT scheduler and the OS's bizarrely dysfunctional memory management.
Whenever I see 4x4 I think of a truck. So, is this going to be able to "off road"?
When I have a kid, I want to put him in one of those strollers for twins and then run around the mall looking frantic.
Couldn't this sort of beast be aimed at the Server Market? I have an application that would eat up this sort of config.
Curently we use a Dual Xeon or a Quad Xeon and these get maxed out at times.
Think outside of the Desktop Beige Box.
After a while, the technology will filter down to desktops but the server end is where people will pay top dollar/yen/euro/rouble for a system that really performs.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
Actually, that means "double double" at In-N-Out. In other words, ordering a "four by four" means you get four patties and four slices of cheese. No, it's not on the menu. Neither is "animal style."
As I've been the real 'quad father' since 1991 (that's the prefered pronounciation of 'qodfathr'), I'm expecting a big payday for such blatant copyright infringment!
Yes, it's true. This man has no dick.
AMD's quad soultion is two dual-core cpus, qhile Intel's is 4 cores in a single package.
TFA seems to suggest that somehow AMD' hypertransport system gives it an edge over Intel's solution, however any external bus (i.e. hypertransport) is going to be slower than package-internal interconnects.
Come on, where's dual-core gzip?
Peter Gibbons: What would you do if you had two cores?
Lawrence: I'll tell you what I'd do, man: two gzips at the same time, man.
Peter Gibbons: That's it? If you had two cores, you'd do two gzips at the same time?
Lawrence: Damn straight. I always wanted to do that, man. And I think if I had two cores I could hook that up, too; 'cause processes dig CPUs with cores.
Peter Gibbons: Well, not all processes.
Lawrence: Well, the type of processes that'd double up on a PC like this do.
Peter Gibbons: Good point.
Lawrence: Well, what about you now? what would you do?
Peter Gibbons: Besides two gzips at the same time?
Lawrence: Well, yeah.
Peter Gibbons: Nothing.
Lawrence: Nothing, huh?
Peter Gibbons: I would idle... I would sit on my ass all day... I would do nothing.
Lawrence: Well, you don't need two cores to do nothing, man. Take a look at my cousin: he's got a 386, don't do shit.
Didn't you see the article on intel. http://techfreep.com/intel-80-cores-by-2011.htm . Talk about an expensive chip.
4x4 is just a different name for Opterons in Opteron motherboards. Feel free to buy a 4x4 mobo and drop in some Opteron 2212s. However, since the 2212 is almost $400 and the FX-70 is only $500, you're probably better off buying what AMD wants you to buy.
*drool*
*pant*pant*pant*
*gasp*
*faint*
Gzip, like all bit-serial encoders, is an inherently serial operation. You can't parallelize it without either attempting to speculate (which may or may not help, and in the case of gzip is probably too fine-grained to give you good performance on modern machines) or running two gzips on two halfs of your files, which will not get the same compression ratio. Sorry.
look I want to have this quad-core CPU, so i have the same speed when working with my vista.
I'm by no means an expert with hardware (and certainly well below the slashdot mean). When I bought my newest computer, it came with 2x2.8 Ghz processors. However, I was under the impression that for games, this was currently all but useless, since most games would only "see" a single processor. Now, it's all fine well and good that my OS can run an antivirus program or encode mp3's or whatnot as I play, but for me that's hardly an issue anyway. I seem to recall hearing that we're just on the brink of dual core support in games that are only now being developed. So if two cores are mostly useless for games (for most people, the most CPU intensive thing that they actually use a computer for), why would I want even *more* cores?
I would love to, just ONCE, see some sort of technical review that doesn't use the word WHOPPING somewhere. This word is annoying as all hell and out of control!
QuadFather takes on a different meaning altogether.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
that seems very weird. why is it that we seem to have hit a wall for RAM limits on motherboards? we had machines with 4gb of ram like 6 years ago. I would rather have 12 dimm slots and 2 sata controllers. you can always buy a sata controller card, but there is nothing you can do about the RAM situation.
I'm bracing myself for the gaming PCs based on this CPU setup, and sold under the name "Quad Damage"...
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Eventually, we're going to move to processors that dynamically create MicroCores (TM), as they function. MicroCores will exist in another dimension such that they can endlessly multiply without taking up any space.
These systems will allow Windows Panorama (codename: Holstein) to run, although not with the new SuperTransparentyandFlashyandGooeyWoohoo interface, of course.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
...it will have to end eventually. As with any system, it is limited to the ability to communicate. In this case, Intel can't communicate with their chip designers and AMD won't communicate with anyone who isn't stinking rich. (I've yet to get them to do so much as reply to an e-mail, answer the phone or even return a call.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
With yearly upgrades, you can lower your costs by selling the old parts.
She can take it. Trust me.
Gentoo doesn't have any magical powers to make things faster. The randomly chosen and poorly understood compiler options you ricers use don't make things noticably faster. And firefox and OO are dog slow even on a pentium 3, nevermind a pentium.
Gillette today announced a razor called "Gillette mach 3x2". It has 3 blades on each side, so two men kissing can shave at the same time with the same razor... Amazing...
Something tells me that the follow up to the quad core processor isn't going to contain five cores.
I don't think so either. Most of the time, chip makers do things in powers of 2. So after the quad core processor, we would get 8-cores, 16-cores and so on.
Maybe there will be a mechanism to switch off individual broken cores, so there might be 7-cores or 15-cores too that are sold cheaper. Rumours about the PS3 say that it can run on a Cell with only 7 intact SPEs. Which would be a version of the above.
C - the footgun of programming languages
4x4 is AMD's short-term approach to put something together that can compete with a Core 2 Duo. Essentially, it is a version of their Opterons aimed at desktop users.
Some time in 2007, they plan to release genuine quad cores (4 cores on one chip), hopefully on AM2 too. Then you should be able to upgrade that board.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Rumours about the PS3 say that it can run on a Cell with only 7 intact SPEs.
Not just "can run with 7" -- it's very likely that every Cell (in PS3s) will have only 7 out of the 8 enabled. This tactic greatly improves chip yield, as a lithography flaw in one of the SPEs means effectively nothing. (And the SPEs take up most of the die area so a flaw is likely to hit one of them. Sure if the main PPE gets b0rked then the chip is shitcanned, but this happens much more seldom.)
They cannot have some PS3s with 7 SPEs and some with 8, as programmers are already going berserk dealing with Cell's complexity. (Personally I love it and want to see the 2nd and 3rd wawe games -- it's the only one of the new consoles where you actually can run a full raytracer for true lights & shadows, before feeding the geometry to the "ordinary" Nvidia rendering chip.)
Earlier it was often said that AMD had fine products but couldn't market their way out of their arse.
I'm so glad this has changed.
("Megatasking" from AMD slides in TFA. A related little gem on console gaming: "more threads = more life-like". Yup, that's it.)
It depends on the layout. The inner cores may have trouble with cooling when you scale out the size.
Neither was GHz an accurate predictor of performance. Intel had pipe-line with higher frequency but longer pipeline.
Hence the "We're slapping together separate cores together to have a bigger num of cores than the concurrence" Intel approach vs. the "We're trying to use a fast interconnect bus and shared circuitry to make our cores more efficient even if we don't have 40nm" AMD approach.
Maybe intel will show us a 16 cores were only the 12 outer cores run at full speed, and the 4 in the middle are put here just to say "I have more cores than the others" !
Just like the old days were Intel with thrice-as-many Ghz didn't absolutely mean 3x the performance.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
For some reason I thought the joke looked like a duck in your ascii art. I thought it was a better image of 'flying over his head', but maybe I'm just reading way too much into ascii art.
Thank you for helping us help you help us all.
Games are still single threaded. Even after you give away a whole CPU to coping with the sheer workload that all the extra Vista fluff adds (indexing/precaching/readyboost/generate thumbnails/run WGA/phone Bill with regular updates on all the pr0n you're surfing lately) and one CPU to run the game because that's all you can use for it, the other two cores are going to be idle anyway.
Practically a waste of money for most users at this stage. Maybe if the games industry magically learns to make multithreaded games overnight... it'll never happen.
Nothing to see here!
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
You may start to see two classes of computers emerge one for graphics and one for standard use. The companies perfer to blur the line so some idiot running Office thinks he needs the fastest thing on the market but people are already getting wise causing a slow down in sales. :(
Those guys who insist on the unnecessarily overpowered office desktop pay for the RnD of your rendering machines.
Gentoo isn't fast because you can compile things -O2. Gentoo is fast because you aren't running every single fucking utility that you don't need by default, pardon my French. And Intel processors suck. ;)
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
I also know plenty about lots of other unix operating systems, and clearly you know very little about any of them. Gentoo is not fast, benchmark it yourself, its the same as any other linux distro. And everything is compiled -O2 on every linux distro, or even -O3, that's not what ricer tards pretend is good about gentoo. And assuming by "utilties" you mean daemons like portmap and rpc.statd (I hope that's what you mean since its the only thing that is even close to making any sense), then you are just being a dumbass. Lets look at some random fedora box:
1849 ? Ss 0:00 portmap
1867 ? Ss 0:00 rpc.statd
Hmm, how exactly are these processes that aren't doing anything slowing things down? And how is it unique to gentoo to not run them? You can stop them on any linux distro, and other distros like arch linux don't run them either. But yet arch linux users aren't stupid enough to pretend that their distro is magically faster than all others.
I have no idea what your remark about intel processors has to do with anything, perhaps all that gentoo has impaired your thought process. How long did you use mandrake for anyways?
Take an operating systems class. Look at kernel code from different systems.
Then you'll realize a properly written daemon that's been swapped out generates virtually no overhead on a modern system. The problem is all the crap code written by idiots who still do polling loops, database scans, update checks, and other such nonsense without the need to do so.
Well, perhaps there is a need to do so: they threw their first hack into the public arena rather than learn how to do it right before showing the code.
I've seen "modern" code that is so crappily written that a couple of subroutines take more runtime memory than entire applications used to. I've seen applications burn more cycles loading splash screens and beep-boop noises than it took to launch the application's core functionality.
Once upon a whence, you loaded an application and used it. Now you load an application which loads the pretty pictures, the video help, the sound effects, a couple dozen extra fonts, adds to the color maps, waits for the splash screen, waits for the intro music, and then finally displays a GUI 5-10 seconds later over top of the same functionality that used to launch in under a second.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.