Question My wish: cpu boards that could handle up to 4 cheaper processors

GunsMadeAmericaFree

Golden Member
Jan 23, 2007
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Ryzen 5 5500 $120 19,478 cpu marks

Ryzen 7 5800X3D $375 27,607 cpu marks

So, for 312% more $, you get a 41% increase in performance.

Wish there was just some way to put multiple cheaper processors on the same motherboard..... you could get almost 60,000 cpu marks of performance for $360 that way..... instead of just 27,000.

Does any company out there still make multi cpu motherboards? (or is the only way to REALLY do this these days to have multiple computers networked together, and use all of them, for example, to do video compression?)
 
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Kocicak

Senior member
Jan 17, 2019
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Multi CPU arrangement must be first of all supported by the CPUs used. Only some server CPUs can do that.

BTW you have already two CPUs under the lid of some Ryzen processors.
 
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VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
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Also, prior to EPYC server boards, we had the enthusiast-oriented SR2 and "Quadfather" boards. Neither was really a commercial success.

Just be thankful that we get Threadripper with up to four chiplets, for prosumers.

You want more than entry-level / Celeron performance? You have to pay for it.

There's always Linux clustering solutions...
 
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zir_blazer

Golden Member
Jun 6, 2013
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You missed the entire evolution of the Local Bus. Previously, Processors were standalone in the sense than the Chipset took care of the Local Bus connection between multiple Processors, whenever on a huge parallel Local Bus (Which had to be supported by the Processors) or with point to point links between the Processor and the Chipset. If you wanted more Processors, you could potentially add them with a more complex Chipset that had more glue logic to keep the system together. Nowadays a Processor talks directly to another one and only if supported by the vendor to be used in such configuration, so there is no possible glue logic that you could add in the middle to make such configurations.
Well, except than in fact there is, like the Intel VCA which is a PCIe card with 3 Xeons E3 and 6 SODIMM Slots. But these require custom Software to actually use, as they're treated as a Coprocessor accelerator and are not at the same level than a standard Processor. So even if you could put on a PCIe card a Ryzen, the Software stack would need to drastically change to accomodate it as some sort of master-slave.
 

moinmoin

Diamond Member
Jun 1, 2017
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On that topic, reminds me of the tweet below. Did you know Zen 2 & 3 were limited to 128 cores and 256 threads for the whole system? That's sufficient for two 64 cores and 128 threads Epyc chips. But obviously for 2 sockets systems to work with Genoa (96 cores and 192 threads) and Bergamo (128 cores and 256 threads) that limit has to have been increased.

 
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