AMD Demonstrates 4x4 Enthusiast System

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

[aft_lizard]

Actually this sort of thing has been around for along time in the x86 market, 2p's have been on Opteron's since they first turned dual core over a year ago.

As far as Intel goes, AMD wont be far behind with there native quad core, infact they are demonstrating K8L in December.

[Marine_Uncle]

"...so I jumped on the computer train which was just taking off! It was a good choice!"
Indeed it was.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Well this wasn't a quadcore as yet ....just found this :

AMD demos 4x4

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Original URL: http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/07/26/amd_demos_4x4/

AMD demos 4x4

By Tony Smith

Published Wednesday 26th July 2006 14:07 GMT

AMD's upcoming 4x4 gaming platform will cost "substantially" under $1,000 - for the processors at least. So said company VP Pat Moorhead, who showed off a prototype system in the US yesterday, though details of the system were kept under wraps.

AMD announced 4x4 last month. It's essentially a two-CPU motherboard rigged for ATI's CrossFire and Nvidia's SLI dual-GPU technology twice over to support four GPUs. Each CPU slot will hold a dual-core Athlon 64 FX processor, so that's four cores. Each chip gets 2GB of dedicated memory, for a total of 4GB. '4x4' is a codename, AMD insists.

The processor company has said it will push the 4x4 platform this coming Christmas. Moorhead said the platform would not be "limited" to hardcore gamers - presumably AMD will promote it to professional content creators too.

Indeed, there's nothing here that no quad-core system will be able to deliver - or, since AMD said this will be possible in due course - and octo-core rig either. AMD's quad-core CPUs will slot into a 4x4 board in place of the two dualies. The big benefit AMD stressed was the system's dual memory buses, one per processor, so there's no logjam at the memory controller as there might be with another chip maker's architecture.

AMD pitched the system as a way to run multiple, processor-hungry apps without degrading the performance of any one of them. ®

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

See diagram at post # 39 and info at #43....not a quadcore as yet...

[Echo Talon]

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.

then we will have 4X2 :) 8 processors on one motherboard. :D

[Marine_Uncle]

A very interesting article. So much rides on the capabilities of developing the CPU architectures to match optimum performance of either MB based (on motherboard) GPU chips or MB slot born video cards.
With this dual memory approach using literally seperate memory busses, this design will be a real winner.
And I can see the high price of the MB really is so due to a very high end GPU being installed on the MB. So one in essence will not have to upgrade standalone video cards to improve performance levels for some time.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Updating....

AMD Plans To Demonstrate Native Quad-Core This Year

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Kristopher Kubicki (Blog) - July 21, 2006 6:57 PM

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Native quad-core en route

Yesterday during AMD's Q2'06 earnings conference call, AMD's President and Chief Operating Officer Dirk Meyer recapped the long term plans for the company.  Although the bulk of his comments were already stated in during the June AMD Analyst's Day, Meyer also added the tidbit that the company plans "to demonstration our next-generation processor core, in a native quad-core implementation, before the end of the year."  Earlier this year, AMD's Executive Vice President Henri Richard claimed this native-quad core processor would be called K8L.

Earlier AMD roadmaps have revealed that quad-core production CPUs would not utilize a native quad-core design until late 2007 or 2008. To put that into perspective AMD demonstrated the first dual-core Opteron samples in August 2004, with the processor tape out in June 2004.  The official launch of dual-core Opteron occurred on April 21, 2005.  On the same call Meyer announced that that the native quad-core would launch in the middle of 2007 -- suggesting the non-native quad-core Deerhound designs may come earlier than expected or not at all.

Just this past Wednesday, Intel one-upped K8L plans by announcing quad-core Kentsfield and Clovertown will ship this year, as opposed to Q1'07 originally slated by the company. 

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[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Interesting performance review...very deep analysis - at Anandtech:

Conroe vs. AM2: Memory & Performance

On CPU die Memory Controller of AMD still best.....Intel processor tops......

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

More :

AMD and ATI Promise Unified Development by 2008

*******************AN EXCERPT ************************

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However, a slide from the AMD/ATI merger documentation has already shown some interesting development plans for 2008.

Specifically, it appears as though AMD and ATI are planning unified, scalable platforms using a mixture of AMD CPUs, ATI chipsets and ATI GPUs.  This sort of multi-GPU, multi-CPU architecture is extremely reminiscent of AMD's Torrenza technology announced this past June, which allows low-latency communications between chipset, CPU and main memory. The premise for Torrenza is to open the channel for embedded chipset development from 3rd party companies. AMD said the technology is an open architecture, allowing what it called "accelerators" to be plugged into the system to perform special duties, similar to the way we have a dedicated GPU for graphics.

Furthermore, AMD President Dirk Meyer also confirmed that in addition to multi-processor platforms, stating "As we look towards ever finer manufacturing geometries we see the opportunity to integrate CPU and GPU cores together onto the same die to better serve the needs of some segments."  A clever DailyTech reader recently pointed out that AMD just recently filed its first graphics-oriented patent a few weeks ago.  The patent, titled "CPU and graphics unit with shared cache" seems to indicate that these pet projects at AMD are a little more than just pipe dreams.

During the AMD/ATI merger conference call, Meyer furthermore added that not too long ago, floating point processing was done on a separate piece of silicon.  Meyer claimed that the trend for the FPU integration into the CPU may not be too different than the evolution of the GPU into the CPU.

[Marine_Uncle]

New generation chip sets tailored for all types of processing shall continue to go forth will zeal, if the size of the transistors can continue to be shrunk allowing for greater package densities. Many of the things we now see projected where in fact desired for a long time.
One issue will continue to be, just how small and less power hungry transistors can be fabricated. System design is flexible, and the easy part in the over all equation. Fine line processing is the tough part. Where the rubber meets the road. One can only pack so many transistors on a die size. And these new generation chip sets obviously require one hell of a lot of logic to be designed, which often can eat into the over all real estate. In short. Nothing has changed. Only improvements in fabrication techniques and new layout tools and equipment to make higher density ICs. The many system designs one reads about where talked about ten years back and more.

[js1138]

My take on all this is that high end PCs are going to be specialized from the CPU up. In a few years you will need to know your application before buying anything fancier than an eMachine.

[Echo Talon]

pretty neat... looks like if your building a NEW system or upgrading mobo, processor and ram(if you need DDR2), the Core2Duo E6600 is the way to go... :)

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Well , looks to me like that the topend stuff will have a life on top of something close to nano seconds....spend your money carefully!

[Echo Talon]

yea the E6600 is mid-range $320-340... comes with the 4MB cache, and can overclock nicely..
its faster than the $875-900 Athlon FX62 without overclocking...

[RunningWolf]

Hey this sounds like a good platform for my next buildup, although I have not 'built one up' since 2002 when I bought my first ever off the shelf Pentium 4 desktop.

Can you give me some tips here, as I am not as up to date on the technology as I used to be. Generally I build close to but not right on the leading-cutting edge to save those exorbitant cutting edge costs.

My fist ever system was a 1992 486 DX-66 with 12mb ram, 340 Maxtor SCSI drives & plextor 6x scsi cd-rom, and the diamond 'viper' video card with 2mb ram onboard LOL,

Oh I forgot the Colorado tape drives, I like the tape drives. I have several large capacity tape drives that I bought at computer shows and I would l like to get them up and going again.

'Wolf

[Echo Talon]

well... im not sure how much $ you want to spend.. but i'd recomend the E6600 as far a motherboard goes, the Asus sems to be the best so far although it will cost you an arm and a leg for it... over $200. ocworkbench.com has a little conroe(core2duo) motherboard buying guide

ocworkbench.com

[miliantnutcase]

I like how AMD wouldn't be where it is today if Intel didn't royally screw up the original Pentium 3(pre-coppermine).
An amazing story of how they were able to capitalize quickly with the Athlon.

[Echo Talon]

you can get the Core 2 Duo processor and motherboard combos from here

Monarch Computer

[Echo Talon]

the Core2Duo is pretty amazing, stuff we havent seen since the Athlon release IMHO...

[miliantnutcase]

Agreed. Its pure seks.