AMD Demonstrates 4x4 Enthusiast System

HardOCP ^ | July 25, 2006 3:00 PM (CDT) | Posted by Steve 3:00 PM (CDT)

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

This morning, the home office of AMD demonstrated a 4x4 enthusiast system, affectionately referred to as the “Quad Father”, running a variety of different multi-threaded applications. Among the demonstrations given, Half Life 2 was run while playing MP3 audio and MPEG4 video running in the background.

AMD, in an attempt to appeal to the entire enthusiast market (not just the high-end enthusiast market) , promised dual CPU bundles for less than a $1,000. AMD says they are targeting what they call the Mega-tasking enthusiast, those of us who use their machines for everything, all the time. Hopefully this little nugget of information will hold you over for now, we’ll have more details for you soon.

[stylin_geek]

I have nightmares from having to deal with SMP in Unix...

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Well, I never did anything like that....

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Four would be even more fun....

[Echo Talon]

hehe

[freedumb2003]

This has always been the way it is. Heck imagine me in 1976 purchasing a cabinet with a row of S-100 BUS Printed Circuit Card connectors, a 3 mhz Z80 CPU card, an I/O card, 4K RAM cards, all that I had to soldier all the sockets, caps, resitors and insert inline 14/16 pin integrated circuit packages into, as well as a 300 baud modem card, and a black and white monitor, for some $2000.

In 1982 or so, when the IBM PC was still considered a toy, I bought a factory-assembled system very similar to the one you are describing (two 8" floppies)for $10,000 for a business I owned.

[Marine_Uncle]

I sort of got in early in the game, due to already working on/with minicomputers as well as larger systems. And how should I say having a hard on for computers, and digital circuit design etc..
At any rate. One sure can get a bang for their bucks in todays world. Sadly Intel continues to lose market share, and dump people. AMD hopefully will not suffer the same fate.
Gee. I can remember when Intel was a struggling ROM producer, and almost went under. We had over a dozen major IC producers all competing. All lost in the end game. Companies like Signetics that for a number of years where major players, gee I remember their first fully 16 bit PACE Microprocessor, just recently dumped the books I had for that chip, where world players. AMD was barely a second rate player back then, only staying alive by producing a lot of small die IC, in mostly standard logic designs, e.g. AND, OR, NOR, NAND, Flip Flops, One shots etc..
Now look at them. They literally have survived the game.

[Marine_Uncle]

"In 1982 or so, when the IBM PC was still considered a toy, I bought a factory-assembled system very similar to the one you are describing (two 8" floppies)for $10,000 for a business I owned."
I went with the then Cromemco Company that had a source out of Philly, so I went to the store to obtain all the hardware and software. Yea. My original system was around 5K, due to a great deal I got on the Dual Floppy Persec Drives.
Your system probably was running a clock rate of 7 to 10 mhz at that point, with a more robost backplane etc..
And it probably contained a Intel 8983 or better CPU, whereas I had the original Zilog 3 mhz CPU which was the hottest microprocessor available at that time.
The good old days. Heh heh. When a microprocessor system cost more then ones automobile, unless one could pick up a cheap Data General or DEC mini computer, which I almost had done. Good Lord! I remember the Data Generals. My brain is not totally shot yet! I still remember the sales pitch we got from a Data General sales rep on how the fully integrated single board minicomputer line the designed would run circles around a DEC PDP8. My department at Westinghouse AeroSpace/Defense bought one of their machines. I ended up not having a chance to play with it.

[freedumb2003]

My weaning computer was a Dec 10 running DECUS OS.

The S-10's were not bad for their day -- you might be right about the clock speed. I wrote all the accounting and office management software and we used WordPro for word processing.

It was a Z80 chip so I taught myself Z-80 assembler (much, much better than that old 8080 assembler).

Sounds like you have a few years on me but we both came out during the infancy of modern computing. My early jobs were programming on punched cards for tape to tape systems. Disk (3330/50) was way too expensive for data storage -- that was what tapes were for).

Now I have a PDA with more storage and computing power than the most powerful and largest computer on the planet back then.

When I look at a micro-SD card with 1 gB of storage I still marvel. People today have no idea what they have.

[Marine_Uncle]

Yes. Our age shows, and so does Ernest's heh heh. He has been around a few years, and had been in programing way back when.
I also continue to marvel at how things have progressed. In 1966 I attended Philco Corporations Tech Rep division Computer and Electronic Tech school. That was my official entry point into electronics. We literally had a Transac 2000 Series Computer System at the school. It was 48 bit length, worlds first all NOR logic mainframe. It really ran circles around those IBM 360s.
As for the Integrated Design end, I was very thrilled to work at Bell Labs at our PA Western Electric/Bell Labs IC fabrication facilities. I was part of a what was then innovative POLY CELL Design lab. The world of ASIC IC was based on what we developed. Imagine designing IC only a few hundred and at most a few thousand MOS transitors in size with 30 micron channel lengths in P channel technology. All fairly state of the art at the time. Some of our fine line processing physicists where of the opinion we would never break the 1 micron channel length MOS barrier. Obviously their quantem mechanic modeling was a bit flawed.
I am simply amazed at how far we have come in such a short amount of time. And not only in the theoretical but in what equipment is now offered to be able to create such tiny transistors. Most have no clue as how exotic the equipment and manufacturing techniques have become as well as the Computer Aided Design simulators and lay out tools.
It is getting close to beam me up Scotty time.
At any rate. Yes. I remember those DEC PDP-10s, and did consider trying to pick up a used one, before I went with the Zilog system. No regrets. I had many computers to play with at work by all the key manufactures. Cray accounts included for IC simulation design.
I do feel blessed I had so many great years having fun each day at work, especially when I got my own UNIX System V AT&T mini computers. Life was real sweet.
Thanks for jogging the old brain cells. I shall lift my Coors Extra Gold Lager up to you guys for the nice chat.

[js1138]

Can Windows handle this?

There have been multiproc versions of Windows Since NT. I used a quad processor NT server in 1997.

The actual question is whether consumer versions of can handle more than two processors. XP Pro can display four processors in Task Manager when running two processors with Hyperthreading, so perhaps it will allow two dual core processors.

[freedumb2003]

My Miller Lite (I am in Milwaukee -- it is a law) raises back to you my good fellows :)

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

I got into the game seriously in 65 with the s/360 ....never did learn how to set up the wiring boards for the hardwired accounting machine printers....really hacked off some of the old timers....

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Well thank you....and a Bud for you,...course that is over there in St Louis.

[freedumb2003]

Back when Men where Men and Programmers were Programmers. We never used Assembler unless we felt lazy or hungover that day -- that was for wimps. We poked the instructions in binary into real (core) memory. And then we wrote physical level code to move the tape drive. We used paper tape as toilet paper after 3 runs. And WE LIKED IT!!

[freedumb2003]

nd a Bud for you,...course that is over there in St Louis.

Laws are laws :)

[Marine_Uncle]

"I got into the game seriously in 65 with the s/360 ....never did learn how to set up the wiring boards for the hardwired accounting machine printers....really hacked off some of the old timers...."
I remember we shared a bit a year back or so on things we had done in our golden age.
I raise my can (no glass? what kind of knuckledragger is this guy)........to you guys. To our past accomplishments, and to years Lord willing, of helping some of the younger ones out as conditions dictate and permit.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

ROFL!

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Actually I was starting my second career as my first career choice was not looking good (I wanted to be a college math prof but
getting thru the final hurdle for the union card - piled higher and deeper - required me to solve a problem that didn't look solvable to me...) so I jumped on the computer train which was just taking off!

It was a good choice!

[ThePythonicCow]

This isn't exactly SMP - it is more likely a NUMA based architecture

Dang - you're right. The following image shows how the two banks of memory are attached to the two sockets, making each bank closer to one socket than the opposite socket. That's the classic defining characteristic of NUMA - which stands for Non-Uniform Memory Architecture.

NUMA means that a given process, running on a given core, will find that some of the memory is closer (quicker to access) than some other parts of memory.

Yes - Linux does NUMA - just fine. I've personally run Linux on a system with 1024 processor cores and 512 separate banks of memory. This was running a beta of the upcoming SUSE SLES10 kernel, with a stock configuration, on ia64 (Intel Itanium) processors. On the SUSE SLES10 configuration for x86_64 processors, such as these AMD processors, you are limited to 128 processors (sorry ;).

We, myself included, have put quite a bit of effort over the last few years into making Linux an outstanding NUMA operating system. It runs on the majority of the worlds largest supercomputers, for this reason in part.

[antiRepublicrat]

4x4, yippie, they're putting in a desktop what the Mac had last year in theirs -- two dual-core chips.

Intel will actually have four cores on a chip, allowing for a much cheaper 4-way, although it will run into memory bandwidth shortages compared to the AMD.