AMD's 4x4 ... Answer to Intel Conroe

[The Pentium Guy]

http://reviews.cnet.com/4531-10921_7-6536370.html
http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot?m=5791
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=2638

"Once upon a time open slots in a PC that anyone could build a card for were a good idea. PCs with them sold better than PCs without them. Now AMD is proposing another new socket that will be open for plugging in of 3rd party co-processors directly on the processor bus." They've also announced a 4x4 chipset, meant to counter Intel's Core 2 Duo chips. From the article: "Socket 4x4 will have a more immediately impact. Set for a release in the latter half of this year, it essentially lets you combine two dual-core Athlon 64 X2 or Athlon 64 FX chips to create a quad-core desktop PC now ... AMD made the point that Socket 4x4 also provides a more flexible upgrade path for a single motherboard system by letting you start with one chip and add another later on. AMD didn't talk pricing, but you can bet neither the Socket 4x4 motherboards, nor systems that use it to include two dual-core CPUs will be cheap."

Imagine the heat from the dual FX-60's though 😛.

Sounds like a great answer to Intel Conroe, the big question is will it have any major performance increase? 2 Processors == double the performance?

-The Pentium Guy

 

[mechBgon]

I'd love to try it out in Premiere Elements (or Premiere Pro except I can't afford the nice toys). Premiere Elements makes sweet use of a dual-core, so it would be interesting to see how it liked quad. Might need that 15k SCSI in real earnest... 😀

 

[EatSpam]

I'd love to use a quad core 4x4 system for running VMware server. By the time this is available VMware should support Pacifica. I wonder how much memory these systems can support, since it won't require or use Registered ECC memory.

My only fear is that motherboard choices will be limited to the "quad SLI and cold cathode" crowd. I want a low end server board, no sound, PCIe slots that accept hardware RAID cards, and wonderful onboard ATi mach64 graphics w/2mb framebuffer!