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?

Vista

[DaMouse404]

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

Re:Vista

[Jinky Williams]

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

When I read this, I snickered uncontrollably.

That is all.

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)

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: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.

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.

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.

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.)

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:= 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.

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.