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

Fuck it, we're going to five cores.

[WilliamSChips]

Hey, it had to be said.

Re:Fuck it, we're going to five cores.

[lordofthechia]

Ahh all the ludicrous amounts of cores, when will it end?

"Sir it's AMD.... they've gone plaid"

Re:Fuck it, we're going to five cores.

[buswolley]

My Quatro shaves just fine thank you anyway.

Re:Fuck it, we're going to five cores.

[mochan_s]

It's 4x4 so next step is 8x8 and ultimately to 64x64.

Maybe the number of cores will be the new Ghz?

Re:Fuck it, we're going to five cores.

[scum-e-bag]

Perhaps not. It depends on the layout. The inner cores may have trouble with cooling when you scale out the size.

Vista

[DaMouse404]

And this just about meets the minimum specs for Vista..
-DaMouse

Re:Vista

[msobkow]

Or a full Linux install with OpenOffice, Mozilla applications, dev tools, utilities, etc.

Sad to say, XP vs. Linux isn't much of a performance competition any more. With a slow enough old box, you'll find they both take forever to boot... ;)

What worries me with Vista is the memory expense of full-application rendering regardless of surfaces displayed, as well as the application expense of always rendering a full screen of widgets instead of skipping over clipped/obscured regions.

The graphics hardware is a small expense of Vista's display approach. I would not be at all surprised to find that total CPU load per application goes up significantly for identical binaries. The widgets exist whether they're rendered or not, so there shouldn't be any real per-application memory expense in that regard.

Other flashy GUI's have relied on OpenGL display clipping to reduce the widget rendering load -- my understanding is Vista's approach disables that clipping, requiring 100% rendering expense regardless of the final presentation.

Re:Vista

[644bd346996]

It only takes a few hours with a fast computer to build a uClibc based gentoo system in a chroot and transfer it to a pentium class machine. The resulting system can surf the web faster than any version of windows, even with Firefox. (OK, so FF was using glibc, so what?) Not even Opera on Win 3.11 was more responsive. The boot time was also faster than Win9x. OO.o and Writely were a bit slower than Office 97, but they looked nicer and had better interfaces.

Sure, running a full redhat distro on an old box like that doesn't work, but it is not hard to build a linux system that outperforms windows across the board.

Re:Vista

[Jinky Williams]

"build a uClibc based gentoo system in a chroot."

When I read this, I snickered uncontrollably.

That is all.

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

my text editor will just fly. I can't wait to spend shitloads of cash on this.

Forced Overkill

[FuturePastNow]

"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.

Re:Forced Overkill

[joe 155]

Well, it seems expensive now, but I remember when a DVD-R drive was over £500; early adopters expect to pay quite a bit for bleeding edge stuff. In a couple of years these will start to show up in regular computer shops for much more reasonable prices.

Also, $1000 doesn't seem that expensive, spending about $2500 on a computer (which you probably wouldn't need to upgrade for about 5 years) wouldn't be that crazy, would it? It seems cheaper than spending $1000 every year and a half (which might be an average upgrade cycle)

Re:Forced Overkill

[ocbwilg]

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.

The target price is under $1000 for the CPUs and (presumably) board. That really doesn't price it out the range of people who were previously buying Athlon FX and Intel EE CPUs. Keep in mind that this is a high-end enthusiast-class platform, rather than the future of AMD's mainstream computing. If you just want dual CPU dual cores, you can buy an Opteron 200-series workstation for less probably. You won't get 4 PCI-E x16 slots and 12 SATA ports, but who needs that anyways? Or, you could just wait until 3Q of 07 and get a native quad core CPU.

Would it be great if they made it cheaper so that everyone could have one? Absolutely. But then they would be cannibalizing the sales of their other higher-end CPUs (why buy a $700 FX-series when you can spend $300 on low end X2 CPUs and get more performance?).

Re:Forced Overkill

[Lord_Dweomer]

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.

This is called an "early-adopter price". You see, there ARE people with a lot of money...and contrary to your statement, they may, and probably do have plenty of sense, they just have more disposable income than you. They buy these when they first come out, and a year or two down the line when they are buying the next hottest toy on the market, companies will be forced to drop the prices on this bad boy so that the rest of us can afford it.

Don't bitch about the price of this just because you're jealous you can't afford it. Just realize that that is how the market works.

Re:Forced Overkill

[modecx]

Heck, I remember paying 900 US bucks on a CD writer way back when 2x cd recording was blazing fast, and 8x reading was just becoming available... Oh, and discs could scarcely be found for less than $10 each at that time.

I considered it some of the best $900 I ever spent, and I still do. No regrets. In fact, it's still humming along in my Indigo2, which I pulled out of the scrap bin some years later.

$1000 bucks for a system loaded with quad processors won't scare many people off. $1000 for a motherboard might, however.

Re:Forced Overkill

[WuphonsReach]

You won't get 4 PCI-E x16 slots and 12 SATA ports, but who needs that anyways? Or, you could just wait until 3Q of 07 and get a native quad core CPU.

Those of us who want to drop in PCIe RAID cards and dual/quad port PCIe NIC cards? (Both of which are usually only available in PCIe x4 sizes.) Plus for less expensive servers, 12 SATA ports could allow the use of Software RAID without having to use up a PCIe slot for a SATA card.

When you get into NIC bonding, it's not unusual to want 4-8 gigabit NICs in the unit. Especially if you're connecting to an iSCSI/AoE switch fabric and you want to connect to multiple switches for fault-tolerance (along with bonding for bandwidth). Even with dual-port NICs, you start running out of space quickly (it's better with quads, but they're hard to source).

These cores go up to eleven..

[Channard]

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.

Re:These cores go up to eleven..

[phaxkolumbo]

We need to be able to moderate to (Score:6, Funny) for comments like these...

4x4 eh?

[lordofthechia]

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...

Re:4x4 eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

They trying to say that all 4 cores get traction or something?

Absolutely. AMD full-time all-core processing provides outstanding traction with almost any air- or water cooled system. It constantly monitors processing conditions, sensing any loss of traction and automatically transfers processes from the cores that slip to the cores that grip. And cores that grip are especially nice if you're into Doom3 or any other game that demands a lot from a processor. Like grid computing, where AMD is a consistent champion, proving itself year after year on some of the world's most challenging algorithms.

Re:4x4 eh?

[Brian Stretch]

They trying to say that all 4 cores get traction or something?

Actually, that's not a bad analogy. Each AMD CPU has its own memory controller and bank of memory so there's lots of memory bandwidth to go around, whereas an Intel dual CPU config has both processors accessing memory through an obsolete FSB architecture. Accordingly, an Intel dual CPU machine will be spinning its wheels in situations where an AMD 4x4 has memory bandwidth to spare.

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.

Just like the SX/DX line

[HiggsBison]

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.

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.

= 4 Acentral Processing Units

[Doc Ruby]

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?

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

[syzler]

Otherwise, why wouldn't a dual CPU workstation class system with dual core CPUs be considered 4x4?

Actually, I think that was the point of the grandparent's post. The name 4x4 to those unfamiliar with the term in the context of motherboards is misleading. I thought the name referred to a quad core chip in a quad chip configuration. The grandparent's question and a few of the other comments I read implies I am not the only one to make this mistake. To the uninitiated a dual CPU workstation with dual cores would be a 2x2 using the nomenclature of offroading enthusiasts. When talking about chip configurations with multi cores it is not obvious that the term 4x4 would be talking about the ratio of cores to video cards.
 

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.

So where's the quad core cpu?

[timeOday]

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?

Responding to my post with a serious one suggests:

[WilliamSChips]

  _|= <---Joke

   o
  -|- <---You
  / \

(the joke looks like a chair because it was originally a Steve Ballmer joke)

Re:Quad Father

[SigILL]

Was somebody at AMD a babylon 5 fan?

Nah, it's a father to stick in your mother board.

Forced Overkill is Right!

[Memnos]

I'm just glad that my Dad wasn't a 4x4 Quad Father, or my Mom would have died during conception.

"Enthusiast Megatasking" is a lousy catchphrase

[timeOday]

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.

Re:"Enthusiast Megatasking" is a lousy catchphrase

[Mad Merlin]

(Come on, where's dual-core gzip?)

Gzip is sufficiently fast that I suspect in most cases it's more limited by your hard drive speed than your CPU speed. There is however, parallel bzip2, which most certainly does benefit from parallelism.

Re:"Enthusiast Megatasking" is a lousy catchphrase

[Jeremi]

AMD is pushing multitasking, a model of parallel processing that will never do desktop users much good beyond a small handful of processors.

I'll bet you a beer that in 10 or 15 years you'll look back on the above statement and admit that you were completely wrong. You may be right that current apps, and even current types of apps, will receive limited benefit from dozens of processors, but what you're missing is that massive parallelism will enable new types of application that are barely imagined now.

Perhaps you remember the famous (apocyphal?) quote, "640K of RAM ought to be enough for anybody". I suspect that the author of that statement thought that because all apps at the time ran in 80x40 monochrome text mode, and what text-mode app could possibly need so much RAM? He didn't forsee the migration to GUI-based apps that was made practical by the availability of large amounts of RAM.

My upgrade path...

[Josiah_Bradley]

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.

Re:So there's...

[Anonymous Coward]

As I was running SPECint
I met a man with 4 computers
Each computer had 4 CPUs
Each CPU had 4 cores
Each core had 4 pipelines
Pipelines, cores, CPUs, computers
How many were running SPECint?

(Answer: one, me. This guy was trying to boot Vista.)

It's an OS problem

[joe_n_bloe]

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.

Re:It's an OS problem

[Mad Merlin]

Indeed, consumer hardware in general is held back by Windows and it's countless deficiencies. With memory for example, you basically can't use more than 2G of RAM with consumer level hardware because a) Windows still has miserable 64-bit support and b) Windows scales very poorly with more RAM anyways. So even those of us that aren't directly crippled by Windows, still have to put up with underdeveloped hardware.

Think outside the Desktop Market...

[RotateLeftByte]

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.

Re:Think outside the Desktop Market...

[Brian Stretch]

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.

4x4 uses low-latency unbuffered RAM while servers use ECC RAM. More importantly, you can already buy dual CPU Opteron motherboards and chips. They've been capturing LOTS of market share from the Xeon, especially at the quad chip (8 core) level where the Xeon's obsolete FSB architecture falls down. Some vendors even have 8 CPU (16 core) boxes. And then there's Cray's Opteron-based supercomputers...

4x4 is basically an Opteron 2xx-series platform adapted for the desktop enthusiast market.

I'm finally cashing in!

[qodfathr]

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!

Re:AMD 4x4 - The off roading CPU

[Awedaura]

It is not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes.

Not as good as intels quad core?

[JustNiz]

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.

Re:Not as good as intels quad core?

[KitesWorld]

They're talking about access to system memory for independant applications.

Basically, if you farm out four tasks to a 2xDual intel setup, the memory bandwidth available doesn't scale. IE, you can add more dies, but at the cost of reducing the memory bandwidth available to each of those dies (to/from system).

With AMD's setup, adding a new die also adds a new memory controller (they're on the die, remember?), which in turn increases the amount of memory bandwidth available (to/from system).

It's already bieng proven an effective scheme in certain server markets, but as always the best solution for you will always depend on exactly what you are doing with the hardware.

from "Memory Space"

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: 5, common. How about 80.

[theexcogitator]

Didn't you see the article on intel. http://techfreep.com/intel-80-cores-by-2011.htm . Talk about an expensive chip.

the obvious reaction

[illegalcortex]

*drool*

*pant*pant*pant*

*gasp*

*faint*

It won't.

[Millenniumman]

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.

Re:It won't.

[Hal_Porter]

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.

I know you're joking, but the strange thing is it's not completely impossible.

It sounds like David Deutsch's interpretation of quantum computation.