News News on AMD's 4x4

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2006/07/26/news_on_amd_4x4/

 

"Quadfather"? Will it order the Bridge Boys to carry out a hit on the bus controller for skimming data off the top of the CRC protection packets?

At any rate, it sounds very powerful, as you intimated previously. Twice.

Nezuji

 

Who exactly does this? I mean, if you have A.D.D. that bad, how can you even sit infront of a computer screen that long??

HL2, Movie, and Music, all at the same time?!? That just sounds ridiculous.

How about playing two instances of HL2, one per monitor, with each hand it's own mouse. That way you can see which hand is a "better gamer"

*boggles*

Aggies

 

So the 4x4 is actually just 2 dual core processors on one motherboard? Don't they already have SMP boards for dual cores?

 

Who on earth wants to play halflife with playing mp3 and playing video. It makes no sence at all. They better had demonstrated a other use for the 3 other cores for example:

one core used for hl2 and the other 3 cores for pyshics calculations and other game enhancedments.

Now that would be inpresive...

 

a couple of cores for your games (3 if they are cpu limited ) and the spare for encoding videos in the background all day long

 

prime example would be my front room.... if i'm playing HL:2 with headphones on and my brother wants to watch a film that's no problemo.. but now with another two cores i can video encode too... huzzah!

 

Big furry deal, I've had that upgrade path for half a year, and Nexxo even longer. Dual cores in dual socket Mobos are nothing new. hell, you can order a computer with 8 dual core CPUs right now if you feel the need to multitask that badly. As much as I love AMD, this smeels of desperation.

 

i agree with Cthippo, i think it probably is a move of desperation somewhat with Conroe alrwady pwning them and kentsfield coming along soon, but who ever said acts of desparation had to be a bad thing. i am certainly very tempted by a dual dual core system them only thing i'm having to think about is cooling the thing cause you've gotts find a good solution for cooling current dual core CPU then double it and still try to keep the air feeding them cool (unless you gone all wet and used watercooling or even phased out for a bit with a vpochill or one of Johann's most excellent custom chillers)

 

Actually, the server flavored dual cores run reasonably cool from what I understand. Keep in mind that when it comes to servers reliability is everything, performance is a distant second. If these things wern't just dead reliable with stock coolers they wouldn't seel in that market space.

That said, my dual single core machine is a pretty good space heater, but I think that it more from the GPUs than the CPUs. Except for when the ambient temp climbs into the 30s the fans are very reasoable noise wise.

 

exactly.

/sarcasm the answer to my prayers - the number of times I have thought I want to play CS:S windowed plus watch a film and encode music on the same screen /sarcasm

this 4x4 leads down the metaphorical off-road track to nowhere until apps are quad core optimised.

 

For cooling its quite easy to water cool two chips (I have a dual xeon setup thats watercooled) runs at a nice 30C most of the time And it is probably cheeper to get a dual core dual xeon / opteron setup than it is to get a dual FX setup as they seem to be very expensive.

 

Fits strangely in the context of the home media center (if I remember the name correctly) that AMD architectures is planned to be.

 

The bottom line is AMD wants to make money and be in the game, so 4X4 is just a bridging solution until they can out do C2D.

What are they trying to archive with 4X4?

1. Give the better performance for the same price.
2. Sell more chips and maintain revenue.
3. Use cheap normal DDR2 on the double socket mother board.
4. Connect the GPU with the CPU through hyper transport.
5. Assign a CPU only for physics calculations and other game enhancements.
6. Create the illusion that 4 is better than 2 and pump the ego’s.

 

Well, I'm amazed, this discussion is claiming that the CPU is too powerful. . .

If I'm not mistaken the whole reasons for such demos of ADD people using PCs is because software is not designed for modern hard-ware. Perhaps playing HL2, MP3s and encoding video all at the same time is not the best use of 4 cores, but until the software catches up I think it's pretty good. Modern software is optimized to run on single core systems, thus we can do 4x the work in the same amount of time as opposed to the same work in 1/4 the time. What is more efficent, processing 4 video streams in 1 hour, or 1 video stream in 15min for the same 4 streams in 1 hour. . .

L J

 

Am i the only one who is having trouble understanding that statement?

 

You can upgrade from a pair of dual core chips to a pair of quad core chips when they're available mid-2007.

 

ohhhhh...... i always thought 4x4 just mean 2 dual cores. so... *counting*... there will be 8 cores! seriously, who needs something like that. i can already imagine this thing be bottlenecked by other hardware components.

 

With Intel and AMD going crazy with their future Multifu**ing Ultra Core 12 6x6 CPU's I can imagine software and Hardware solutions that would make it possible to have one Million Cored Central PC, with incredibly fast network sollution and 'client' systems around the house. These client systems could be as small as an LCD with small CPU/GPU unit (AMD/Ati maybe). However this is too Sci-Fi as I don't think we'll see such fast affordable network sollutions in near future. Hey but what if we'd use the network only for video output and user input.

 

Somehow I think that there will be more than enough software to keep up with technology, look at crysis for a moment the recommended specs are crazy, it makes you wonder what they used to show the graphics.

I would have never thought that 4x4 would come out so close to the release of conroe.

We will see if these things are really Sci-Fi or reality in the future.

We are looking at the Dawn of a new future for computing.