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."

Comments

Re:4 * x16 == x16+x8+x16+x8?

[FuturePastNow]

I think they're going by the size of the slot rather than the number of PCIe lanes it has. An x8 slot can support graphics cards fine, if it has the x16 physical connector.

Re:4 * x16 == x16+x8+x16+x8?

[masklinn]

There are something like 3 parts to PCIe-speak on motherboards:

• The number of lanes, which depends of the motherboard chips. That's the total PCIe bandwidth your motherbord can handle
• The physical size of the PCIe slots. That tells you what you can fit in the slots. For example, graphic cards use x16 slots, but can hum along perfectly with only 8, 4, 2 or even 1 lane (albeit with a much reduced bandwidth to work with).
• The number of lanes in every slot, which gives you the bandwidth per slot: all PCIe devices must support x1, but they can use up to x32

What they're saying here is that you're getting 2 x16 and 2 x8 lanes slots, but all the slots have a physical x16 size, which means that you can plug pretty much anything in it, including 4 PCIe graphic cards at once (since graphic cards require physical x16).

I'm not sure I've been perfectly clear though, anyway it's fairly clear when you talk about slot size versus number of lanes.

Re:= 4 Acentral Processing Units

[ocbwilg]

With two CPU chips with 2 cores each, shouldn't that be called "2X2"?

It was explained awhile back, but 4x4 isn't directly related to the core count. Otherwise, why wouldn't a dual CPU workstation class system with dual core CPUs be considered 4x4?

4x4 actually is in reference to 4 CPU cores and 4 video cards, at least that is the way that it was explained to me.

Re:= 4 Acentral Processing Units

[Dun Malg]

I never thought that the "4x4" designation for "all wheel drive" cars made any sense, either.

I helps once you understand that the designation isn't limited to "cars", but applies to ALL wheeled vehicles. The format is (total number of wheels) x (number of driven wheels). For example, the US Army's M-939A2 5 ton truck is a 6x6-- 6 wheels, all driven-- and the M1074 PLS is a 10x10! Civilian trucking, by comparison, will usually make do with 10x8 on the tractor unit, being more concerned with weight capacity than offroad ability.