Opteron 4x comming 2006 fast desktop workstations for all.

[videoclone]

Does this mean someone like me could go out and buy a 4 Socet Server motherboard put 4 Opteron 4x Quad CPU's in it and add a high end videocard

Giving me a 16 CPU system with a 24 - 32 Pipelined videocard ... powerhouse

Would any day to day programs even use this amount of CPUs (ie, GordianKnot, DVD Decoding. so on) ...

Would any OS's even support this ammount of CPUs on a desktop.... (ie Windows XP/64/2003/longhorn)

I think the future of PC's looks rather interesting ... 1 next gen PC will literally be 16 times faster then a previous old school PC because it contains 16 PC?s in 1 ?and this could go on for many many years to infinity and beyond.

 

[ProviaFan]

There's a review out there (on GamePC, IIRC) that shows that dual dual core Opterons don't frequently show a great increase over regular dual Opterons in any one task (which seems to indicate that most multithreaded applications that the average person might run are optimized for two threaded operation). As time goes on, applications will become more heavily multithreaded to take advantage of the future many-core CPUs, but for now more than two processors or cores only helps in extreme multitasking situations or with certain well-designed and optimized software (more likely to be found as you move into scientific and other specialized stuff).

 

[RichUK]

Originally posted by: videoclone
Does this mean someone like me could go out and buy a 4 Socet Server motherboard put 4 Opteron 4x Quad CPU's in it and add a high end videocard

Giving me a 16 CPU system with a 24 - 32 Pipelined videocard ... powerhouse

Would any day to day programs even use this amount of CPUs (ie, GordianKnot, DVD Decoding. so on) ...

Would any OS's even support this ammount of CPUs on a desktop.... (ie Windows XP/64/2003/longhorn)

I think the future of PC's looks rather interesting ... 1 next gen PC will literally be 16 times faster then a previous old school PC because it contains 16 PC?s in 1 ?and this could go on for many many years to infinity and beyond.

lol ... you will not be able to use all of the cores .. even tho that would be amense ..

 

[ryanv12]

Well, I think you would only see a benefit if you were:

hosting 2 Battlefield II games
playing BFII on some other server
rendering a 3d image
running an Anti-Virus scan
encoding a DVD movie

etc.

Load that sucker up with 16GB of RAM and you're good to go.

 

[PlatinumGold]

Originally posted by: videoclone
Does this mean someone like me could go out and buy a 4 Socet Server motherboard put 4 Opteron 4x Quad CPU's in it and add a high end videocard

Giving me a 16 CPU system with a 24 - 32 Pipelined videocard ... powerhouse

Would any day to day programs even use this amount of CPUs (ie, GordianKnot, DVD Decoding. so on) ...

Would any OS's even support this ammount of CPUs on a desktop.... (ie Windows XP/64/2003/longhorn)

I think the future of PC's looks rather interesting ... 1 next gen PC will literally be 16 times faster then a previous old school PC because it contains 16 PC?s in 1 ?and this could go on for many many years to infinity and beyond.

ya, windows 2003 server will handle it. mb even windows 2003 server web edition. i think MS charges extra beyond 4 cpus tho.

 

[Markfw]

Originally posted by: ProviaFan
There's a review out there (on GamePC, IIRC) that shows that dual dual core Opterons don't frequently show a great increase over regular dual Opterons in any one task (which seems to indicate that most multithreaded applications that the average person might run are optimized for two threaded operation). As time goes on, applications will become more heavily multithreaded to take advantage of the future many-core CPUs, but for now more than two processors or cores only helps in extreme multitasking situations or with certain well-designed and optimized software (more likely to be found as you move into scientific and other specialized stuff).

But I could get two and run 8 instances of F@H !!!

 

[Lonyo]

Originally posted by: PlatinumGold

Originally posted by: videoclone
Does this mean someone like me could go out and buy a 4 Socet Server motherboard put 4 Opteron 4x Quad CPU's in it and add a high end videocard

Giving me a 16 CPU system with a 24 - 32 Pipelined videocard ... powerhouse

Would any day to day programs even use this amount of CPUs (ie, GordianKnot, DVD Decoding. so on) ...

Would any OS's even support this ammount of CPUs on a desktop.... (ie Windows XP/64/2003/longhorn)

I think the future of PC's looks rather interesting ... 1 next gen PC will literally be 16 times faster then a previous old school PC because it contains 16 PC?s in 1 ?and this could go on for many many years to infinity and beyond.

ya, windows 2003 server will handle it. mb even windows 2003 server web edition. i think MS charges extra beyond 4 cpus tho.

MS pricing structure IIRC is not based on the number of cores, but on the number of CPU's.
ie: An Intel P4 has 2 logical CPU's but only 1 physical CPU, so it's counted as one, I *think* they consider the Intel and AMD dual core processors as only one as well, but it's something MS has looked at, and I remember reading something about how their pricing was related to dual core processors, and which OS supported what CPU configurations, but I can't remember where it was.
I do remember they had different limits on the number of physical cores and the number of logical cores, to take into account things like multi core processors.

 

[ProviaFan]

Originally posted by: Markfw900
But I could get two and run 8 instances of F@H !!!

Now we're talking!

 

[theMan]

cant wait till the come out with 8 core opterons, and a mobo that has 8 sockets! mmmmmmmmmm... 64 cores.

 

[Jeff7181]

I think this is great... computing power increases almost linearly as you add cores. Much better way of getting more power than increasing clock speeds. I mean... in the past year we've probably seen computing power increase by about 20% at best. Move from single core to dual core and you get about a 90% increase. So much more effective than increasing clock speeds especially now that we're at a point where it's difficult to get transistors to switch on and off any faster. And a 200 MHz increase in speed isn't what it used to be.

If AMD is really planning on quad cores, I now see why they'll be switching to DDR2. Memory bandwidth isn't a problem now... and it's really not with dual cores either with dual channel PC3200 be shared between 2 cores. But with 4 cores, they'll be starved for bandwidth... it'll be like using PC1600 RAM in a Socket 754 setup. Hopefully DDR2 will scale better now that AMD will be using it too and the industry can completely switch to it. 1 GHz DDR2 would be nice.

 

[Vegitto]

I don't get why the industry just wants DDR2 speed. Why not try to improve latencies at 1 GHz?

 

[BitByBit]

Because bandwidth is more important when dealing with multiple cores than latency.
Latency does, incidently, improve as clock speeds increase.

 

[Jeff7181]

Originally posted by: BitByBit
Because bandwidth is more important when dealing with multiple cores than latency.
Latency does, incidently, improve as clock speeds increase.

Correct... the latency of CAS2 DDR400 is equal to that of CAS4 DDR800 in terms of real time.

 

[HDTVMan]

Isnt AMD going to skip DDR2 in favor of DDR3? Isnt that because of latencies?

 

[colincsl]

AMD's socket M2 will use DDR2

 

[HDTVMan]

Bummer. Whats the thought on going to DDR3 by the CPU companies or is this something for the motherboard companies to push for?

 

[sandorski]

I imagine those will be quite pricey, but damn!

 

[IntelUser2000]

Hmm, recent AMD Analyst presentation says Quad cores in 2007 not 2006, the quad core at 2006 was speculation by the way.