Truly Momentus News: Quad Core on Current Platform

[Hard Ball]

That S940 would get the quad treatment; if that is the case, it would be royal,

http://www.crn.com/sections/breakingnews/dailyarchives.jhtml?articleId=177103857

Advanced Micro Devices is promising that no platform change will be required to move to its next-generation quad-core processors. And to prove it, AMD plans to demonstrate the technology in the middle of this year.

When AMD rolls out dual-core processors with built-in virtualization hooks midyear, the company also aims to demo quad-core processors running on its current server platform, said Marty Seyer, senior vice president of AMD's Commercial Business and Performance Computing, Microprocessor Solutions Sector unit.

If this is the case, then it would be 4-way computing on currnent single socket S940 system, and 8-way computing on current dual socket S940; all that by Q1 07.

 

[aka1nas]

I am pretty sure that there is a snowball's chance in hell that they would also release quad-core socket 939 chips, and I am sure that additionally pigs would have to be flying for my Neo2 to get a BIOS update to support it. :brokenheart:

Still, pretty sweet for socket 940 setups. Someday. I can grab that quadsocket Tyan board with the extra 4 socket riser and have 32 cores of Opteron goodness!

 

[Hard Ball]

Originally posted by: aka1nas
I am pretty sure that there is a snowball's chance in hell that they would also release quad-core socket 939 chips, and I am sure that additionally pigs would have to be flying for my Neo2 to get a BIOS update to support it. :brokenheart:

Hey, you never know,

It's possible that the "server platform" could also extend to the S939 Opteron 1xx; which if ever happens, would be the hottest thing ever to hit the market in many years, and would extend the life of S939 into the same lengendary length as Socket A. Although I think that's not very likely, even the slight possiblity of that makes me cringe.

 

[tommo123]

this would be sweet if that happened.

would love to rip out the X2 i have now and put an X4 in its place.

would need more RAM tho

 

[RichUK]

Brilliant now we just have to wait until software catches up.

 

[Markfw]

maybe I will wait to upgrade my 248's to 280's until they come up with quad's !

 

[erwos]

What's even more fascinating is the rumor that AMD is going to be slashing the prices of the Opteron 2XX series by half in a couple months, putting only a $30 or so premium over standard 1XX series chips. Having a quad-core machine might be considerably cheaper than you think by the time this CPU comes out... Could be S940 is going to turn into the new enthusiast platform.

-Erwos

 

[Furen]

I seriously doubt 4 cores can be fed by a two DDR400 memory channels. I think this whole thing is a proof of concept more than an actual product that we can expect on the market any time soon.

 

[Vegitto]

I think some people in here are forgetting that socket AM2 also has 940 pins.

 

[dguy6789]

Originally posted by: Furen
I seriously doubt 4 cores can be fed by a two DDR400 memory channels. I think this whole thing is a proof of concept more than an actual product that we can expect on the market any time soon.

Why not? A single Athlon 64 is easily fed by sub pc2100 single channel speeds. Pc3200 and dual channel are all superfluous extras.

 

[Furen]

Well, the OP said "on current socket 940" after all. I suppose socket AM2 could work for dual-socket systems as well, as long as AMD decides to release 200 series Opterons on it. The article itself says the following, though:

"To go from single-core to dual-core to quad-core on the same platform, that has never been done in the industry," he [Marty Seyer, senior vice president of AMD's Commercial Business and Performance Computing, Microprocessor Solutions Sector unit] said, adding that AMD's message surrounding the quad-core demonstrations will be simplicity and stability.

Which implies that these are indeed for current Socket940.

PC3200 increases performance, as does dual-channel. Having 4 cores on the CPU means that the 4 cores share a 6.4GB/sec memory bandwidth which, in memory intensive applications would be the equivalent of having a single PC1600 channel for each core. Now that I think about it, though, I agree with you. Some applications will probably be bottlenecked by the memory bandwidth but lots of applications that rely on compute power completely will see sizable gains.

 

[mamisano]

Well, by Mid 2006 I don't think the "Current" server platform will be S940. I expect them to move to 1207 (?) with DDR2 and maybe the newer version of HyperTransport.

Not sure if anyone is aware that AMD implemets HT spec 1.03. There have been releases of 1.05 and 1.1 upgrades to the 1.x spec and a little more recently 2.0b, which is fully backwards compatible with 1.x spec products.

The most current HyperTransport technology I/O Link Specification is Release 2.0. To previous specifications, HyperTransport Release 2.0 adds three new speed grades: 2.0 GigaTransfers/second, 2.4 GigaTransfers/second and 2.8 GigaTransfers/second. These new speed grades yield a 16 Gigabyte/second, 19.2 Gigabyte/second and 22.4 Gigabyte/second aggregate bandwidth, an improvement of 75 percent as compared to previous 1.x specifications. In addition, HyperTransport Release 2.0 adds to the existing PCI and PCI-X mapping to include a mapping to PCI Express.

One of the important features of this new specification is that Specification 2.0 devices are fully backward compatible with prior 1.x devices. This means that existing investments in the technology will continue to be leveraged in the future.

These new capabilities make HyperTransport technology the highest performance, lowest latency chip-to-chip I/O link available today and continue the HyperTransport tradition of interoperability with popular industry technologies.

 

[aka1nas]

Originally posted by: Furen
Well, the OP said "on current socket 940" after all. I suppose socket AM2 could work for dual-socket systems as well, as long as AMD decides to release 200 series Opterons on it. The article itself says the following, though:

"To go from single-core to dual-core to quad-core on the same platform, that has never been done in the industry," he [Marty Seyer, senior vice president of AMD's Commercial Business and Performance Computing, Microprocessor Solutions Sector unit] said, adding that AMD's message surrounding the quad-core demonstrations will be simplicity and stability.

Which implies that these are indeed for current Socket940.

PC3200 increases performance, as does dual-channel. Having 4 cores on the CPU means that the 4 cores share a 6.4GB/sec memory bandwidth which, in memory intensive applications would be the equivalent of having a single PC1600 channel for each core. Now that I think about it, though, I agree with you. Some applications will probably be bottlenecked by the memory bandwidth but lots of applications that rely on compute power completely will see sizable gains.

If I could get such a chip for my Neo2 I could probalby go buy some uber OC'ing RAM and run it at high speed to mitigate that somewhat at least.

 

[Accord99]

It's not for the current platform:

"AMD executives said the chip maker is working with its third-party vendors to ensure that the same socket that will be used for its forthcoming dual-core processors supporting DDR2 memory will also work for its quad-core processors, expected to be released in 2007."

 

[Furen]

Is it me or did the article get updated?

 

[Bull Dog]

Yep it got updated.

Well this one did.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20060126111118.html

 

[Furen]

Now this discussion sounds like we dont know what the hell we're all talking about...

 

[TrevorRC]

Originally posted by: erwos
What's even more fascinating is the rumor that AMD is going to be slashing the prices of the Opteron 2XX series by half in a couple months, putting only a $30 or so premium over standard 1XX series chips. Having a quad-core machine might be considerably cheaper than you think by the time this CPU comes out... Could be S940 is going to turn into the new enthusiast platform.

-Erwos

Not a couple months, A month.
As in 30 days or so.