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."

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)

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?

"Enthusiast Megatasking" is a lousy catchphrase

[timeOday]

AMD is pushing [hothardware.com] 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:Quad Father

[Anonymous Coward]

no, just a gangster movie fan.

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:= 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.
 

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: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.

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:Forced Overkill

[Anonymous Coward]

There are practical reasons for spending the money. If you have a dual chip quad core that will max out the number of render nodes for a copy of Maya. You're talking about a $7,000 piece of software so an extra $1,000 to max out performance in rendering makes a lot of sense. Most of my machines are constantly tied up rendering. Every time I add a machine I figure I'll finally have one to work on while the others render but it isn't long until it gets sucked into rendering. After the first of the year I'm picking up a pair I just haven't decided for sure on AMD or Intel. Motherboards may wind up being the decider. Pretty much since the 350 machines word processing has been maxed out and unless you're doing corporate spreadsheets you don't need the power for that. Graphics and games are the driving force and will be from here on out. We're still a long way from maxing performance there. Until you start to see systems that can render 10s of millions or perferrably tens of billions of polygons realtime at 1080i resolution there will be demand for more power. 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. Better to come up with applications for everyday people that need the power than hoping they are foolish enough to think they need it. Apple is doing a better job of that by pushing graphical interfaces. That may in the end win them a big market share. Microsoft makes money mostly off new computers. If sales fall off sharply it'll hurt them. Macs have seen a rise in sales unlike the rest of the market. OSX Leopard is going to give them an even bigger edge.

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.

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.