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."

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...

= 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?

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: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.

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: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: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.

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:Think outside the Desktop Market...

[mofag]

I agree, I just bought a dual zeon 5160 for my office to do number crunching. Thing is though the article didn't appear to me to address the issue that the current generation of intel core 2 duos piss all over anything that AMD can offer in terms of gaming, home entertainment or the kind of number crunching I do at work (straight-forward mathematical modelling). I am a loyal fan of AMD since socket 7. Its completely alien to me to buy intel components but right now, the only way I could spend money on AMD is as a charity case and am not sure that they qualify simply because they are not quite the worlds biggest CPU brand. Yes the AMD architecture is sexy but only so long as you dont look at the actual performance of their FX62 versus the X6800, E6700 or E6600. Maybe opteron-based machines are still the best for serving web pages and databases but how many of us use our PCs to do that? I sympathise with all the other AMD fans on here but there is a whopping ;) great elephant sitting grinning in the corner of the /. room

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 [wikipedia.org].