AMD Demos 4x4 Platform

WoW!!!!! This will be so useless. Who the heck needs a PC with four processors? Now thats just crazy.

Gee, I never would have believed a platform with two (dual-core, or not) processors could outperform a single (dual-core, or not) processor! [Just kidding]

What it really is, is this: It's the so-called "Megahertz Myth" being played yet again.

More processors=faster/better computer. While largely true, it will still depend on what you're using a computer for in the first place. Multi-tasking on the things will likely be great, but a machine dedicating its CPU to a single process (online FPS gaming for example) will probably do that single task much better (faster).

However, I can't really blame them for playing this game. It's their own fault after all. It used to be that the consumer could count on seeing those stickers touting the GHz and would purchase a computer largely based upon "Higher GHz=better" hype. Apple and AMD were losing the consumer because of that, so they quit playing. Now it's the same game with a different ball.

Didn't Intel claim they would have a CPU with 99 cores in a few years?

There are people how still use windows 98, they seem that there is no need of pentium 4 computers..

4x4 platform would be great, imagine working with Photopshop CS2, 3D Studio Max while capturing a dvd with an antivirus scan at the same time.

4 processor cores in a single package using a shared bus? Never a good ideal.

Yet I'm a compuer geek and I love to plug in 2 quad-core chips into 4x4-supported motherboards... That would be up to 8 cores... Wow! I'd love to have that... :)

I think then hard disks would become the limitation, they would need to add at least 1GB of flash drive to a hard disk drive to cope with the data transfer.

Well, it just shows that intel had sticky feet after all!

What the industry really needs is a motherboard that runs a little faster, how about a fiber optic FSB and faster RAM? Move the information around the board faster.

Fiber Optic FSB?? What are you smoking... So you say that 2Gb/s is faster than say 12.6GB/s or what ever the HIGH transfer rate is, is worse?

Get thinking right. The benefit of 'multi-core' is shared processing, add more cores get more performance. It is a "myth" that works however AMD need to move to 65nm and add more transistors if they ever plan on taking back the high-end market from Core2.

And the next Intel based desktop chip is 4 Core2 cores on one chip, so twice the performance from shared processing?

And a single core is NOT as effective as two as the single core gets bogged down by background chores and slows you up.

We can NEVER have enough cores. Obviously those who think that this idea is insane have never tried to edit video...or how about HD? What about uncompressed 10-bit HD??? Games aren't the only demanding tasks you know. I can honestly say without a doubt that if I could afford an 8-core workstation with 8-16 GB ram I would do it. As a gamer it would be overload but as an editor it would be amazing. Real-time uncompressed HD editing...

Who needs quad? I remember the same type statement years ago when someone said In a major Mag { who will ever need more than 4.77 mgz } .
It will be used and gaming will be the first to use this, and I can think of many things now that I could use this power. But most of all the day we quit building better and faster is the day we just as well set down and do nothing.

It's no wonder so many people are on ritalin. Megatasking is the devil.

No matter how many CPU's you use, Microsoft Windows will
** always ** be slow!

To all the naysayers let me remind you of some other interesting observations.

"I think there is a world market for maybe 5 computers." Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM 1943

"But what is it good for?" Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM 1968 commenting on the microchip

"640K ought to be enough for anybody" Bill Gates 1981

Myra's right.... you guys are idiots.

Breaking News: Intel planning 32 cores by 2010

tgdaily.com/2006/07/10/intel_32_core_processor/

:)

Having more cores is wonderful for multitasking. Most people wont need more than 2 cores for now becuase not that many programs are Multi-Threaded, and even fewer games support SMT (Symetric Multi Threading). Personally I think Intel is going to take back the performance crown for awhile - but then AMD will take it back in 5-10 years, and so on. IMO Intel does still need to get rid of the FSB and make some hypertransport equivlent. Otherwise these advances in computer chip technology are great for consumers because prices are coming down, performance is being boosted, and with more cores and more sockets on motherboards - the more options will be available to us. I've heard rumors that in multi-socket motherboards one might be able to plug in say a quad-core intel into one chip socket. but in another socket put in a phyics chip that also provides a boost to the graphics chip (or may actually be a graphics chip that provides a boost to game or multimedia content physics!) Graphics chips may start coming as motherboard chips to start lessening the bandwidth needed to get information to and from the main CPU. needless to say there are many possibilities - and again - they're all good for us - the consumers.

You ask, "Who needs this much computing power?" ANS. "I do!" Ever hear of Blue Ray or HD DVD you "doubting" neysayers? Well, I currently perform video editing on a dual core AMD 64 and it's nowhere near enough "comuting power" to edit "high definition," native widescreen video - no question about it.

My current Xi computer configuration is stipped of everything not aimed at video or still photographs. This system allows me to edit the stuff, though relatively slowly, but better than any computer of the past, Pent IV included. And of my 4 gigs of RAM, I must throw a full gig of RAM soley for the purpose of "preview" function just to get a barely exceptable and viewable quality while attempting to edit.

Yes, I know, "How many video editing consumers are out there?" ANS, "More and more! And when the time comes that we don't have to seriously degrade high-quality video by a factor of four - so the dvd burners and players can handle it - just wait - the time is coming soon! You will see the difference and what all the fuss is about."

"WoW!!!!! This will be so useless. Who the heck needs a PC with four processors? Now thats just crazy."

HAhahahahahhaha...is that you Bill Gates?

"No one will ever need more than 640k of RAM."

hahahahahhahahhahahaha

Honestly.. I dont see the need for multi cores.. I have My Gaming rig.. A64 S939 w/ Gig of ram and a 6600GT. and I have my Surfin the net, checkin email rig... 2.4 P4 w/ 512 and a 64mb Vid card. Im perfectly happy. I dont need a 4000 dollar PC. Sure the Quad cores would be cool, and maybe one day Ill try em. But until my Boss brings it into our store to test.. I have to deal with Single and dual core rigs to build

The increase in processing power is welcome, but the thing to remember is that ... the performance increase will not be as noticable in real-life applications as there are a lot of factors that are needed to make multicore systems fast.
- the compiler has to be improved to incorporate this parallelism
- multi tasking - but what if the two tasks want to access the hard-disk at the same time.
- how good is the memory mapping going to be

so with multicore even predicting the preformance increase in real life appllications is just going to be hard - right now. It is still early and there needs to be a lot of software improvement to get the higher processing power to the consumer.

I am using a quad-G4 with 16GBs of ram and that is slow. This sounds extremely useful for my company. Maybe I can pick up a few, add 32GBs of Ram and finally get some work done.

games used to not rely on 3rd party graphics cards, where today most games require one.

often times technology is the mother of invention. multi-core technology may have few uses today, but rest assured that tomorrows desktop will take full advantage of multi-processing.

It's not a question if we need it or not, soon it's going to be the only thing that can be purchased. Even if a P3 is "enough" for many applications, you simply can't get them anymore through normal channels atleast.

And don't forget, a computer that is too fast will never be built.

As an old guy who has worked on various mainframe (IBM, Honeywell) I find the discussion of multiple 'cores' amusing. What is happening in Micro land is what was and is in Mainframe land. The difference is size and cost.

What used to cost millions now cost hundreds. SMP, multiple paths to disk drives, shared memory versus separate/dedicated memory have been addressed by the mainframe guys, but the costs were incredible.

Look at what the mainframers do and implement it on a micro. Isn't that what we are doing here?

Viva the chip makers. Now let's see if the software guys can catch up. That has always been the problem.

This will be sweet while I host a listen CSS (Counter-Strike Source) server (non-Steam). Not only will I be hosting from a computer and save money on renting a hosted server, but play from it simultaneously! The only limitations would be my internet bandwidth lol -.-''

We should all be thankful that the technology keeps evolving and moving forward instead of saying "WoW!!!!! This will be so useless. Who the heck needs a PC with four processors? Now thats just crazy.", at some point all PCs sold will have multi-processors although I would like to see them concentrate on improving or finding a replacement for the HD first and hopefully applications in the near future will be able to take advantage of multi-processor systems but as far as this news bring it on!

You people are so behind brand name of Intel. AMD have been preety good and have been producing the fastest CPUs ever.

It's like people like buying Sony products because it is a good brand. But they don't offer even half the features others do in similar equipments and cost is almost twice.

For same money I can buy two pieces of other brand and use them until they die.

Besides the myth of FSBs and fast speed multicores. We need to have a well designed softwares on it.

I am happy with 2.4 GHZ CPUs and 2 gig ram. All I need is a fastest HDD.

Wish you all luck with 4 core cpus.

great!
Core 1&2: emerge world
Core 3: vim, gmake, gdb (we love to code)
Core 4: X11, firefox, xmms, IRC

I can't wait for eight cores. Is anyone else in the mood to build virtual machines for cross platform development?

Bring on more cores, I'll keep em busy.

Also, think about deeper integration of GPU and CPU. Quite frankly, pretty soon your GPU functions can just run on one of the CPU cores. Or 2 or 4. The more, the merrier, GPUs already have large numbers of shader pipelines, lots of parallelism there.

only noobs need more than 640KB of memory

And don't forget, a computer that is too fast will never be built.

Now, that's the smartest thing that's been said yet. There is no "megahertz myth" (if there was, nobody would overclock). All other things equal, faster clock=faster computer. There's no such thing as enough gigahertz, cores, transistor, RAM, HDD space, video card RAM, architectural efficiency, cubic inches, and ketchup.

Insert Tim Allen-esque manly grunts here.

Who needs it? One word:

Crysis

The simple answer is VMware for test labs or high end users that require multiple os images.

Now all we need is a proper hypervisor in hardware.

Two cores is nice since one can do background tasks, if possible, while the other can do foreground. As for more cores it is questionable as to how they can be used. Multithreading is rather complex to program and make it work - thus very few programs use it, most of these are server based (+ some games). We could see and use real power of a 4 core or 8 core system on a desktop if programming tasks could be spread over all cores. There is also the question of people that would utilize all this power - my Athlon 1800 has 2+ years and its fine for 60h/ week use in programming.

If applications remain single-threaded, 8 cores would be pretty useless since not many people do 8 tasks at once. Applications begin to be parallelized, but some applications are easier to paralellize than others. Video is easy. Scientific computing is often not easy. The solution algorithms are often sequential - you cannot do step 2 until step 1 is done. In many cases, new solution methods have to be developed to take advantage of multiple processors. The bottom line is that the benefits of many cores will not come to everyone, and not quickly.

I am viewing this page using DOS / LYNX and a shell account on a 386. This is much faster then my 286/20 mhz I moved from. Going from MFM 20 megabyte Segate hard drives to a 100 megabyte RLL full sized drive from Quantum rocks too.

Can't get enough cores. I do financial risk modeling which can take up to 52 hrs with a decent single core.

Nice move AMD. First, blow 5.4 billion buying ATi. Second, responding to Intel's Core 2 Duo with two $1,000 processor on one motherboard. Everyone has $2,000 to spend on processor, right?

We need it, as the day is not far off when every home PC becomes an editing table of movies and others with the advent of blueray and HD DVDs. Home will be come a mini editing lab.

More Power!!!!

Forget multi core Pc's....I want the near A.I. model w/synaptic memory modules with a 500THZ FSB.

Of course Windows Infinity will suck all that power up :(

This will be a sweet developement for gamers like myself! Better yet, think of all the processing power you will have to run spare-time apps like Seti@Home, TANPAKU, and other Volunteer computing projects!

I started with a Vic-20 No memeory and a whole 37 bytes. Commodore 128 Same thing only now there was cd avialable on some. Much better then Tandy 2floppy's and 640 megabytes but until Windows came along there was no graphic interface .The best that DOS had to offer was DOS-5 Shell otherwise it was Tandy or Commodore with having the only graphic interfaces available.I want to thank Bill Gates for Windows and all those poor treated millionaires he created stealing their programs and forcing them to work for them by hiring .Hey all you poor children (under 60) you don't know anything about anything that I can't get on-line.. Go suck an egg.
The old man.(80)

apple has had a quad core machine for over a year, why is this such a big deal? i mean, yes its cool, but it isn't really that big of a deal.

John,

From the article: "Buyers should be able to get a bundle with two FX-branded processor to use with the 4x4 platform for less than $1000."

It's under $1000 for TWO processors. Yeah, it's not cheap, but it's not as outrageous as $2000 either.

All I have to say about more cores...... 42!

"Now let's see if the software guys can catch up. "

This is the key to equation right here! The home consumer is now getting server technology in desktops! This ROCKS!

Whoever said they were doing video editing on a G4 needs to use a G5...

This 4x4 will allow for insane gaming, video editing, running server app, etc -> AT HOME! The power is being put in the users hands (well hardware wise) now we need Bandwidth! More Bandwidth!

This has to have been written in jest:
"WoW!!!!! This will be so useless. Who the heck needs a PC with four processors? Now thats just crazy."

It reminds me of the statements regarding memory in years gone by. Back then it was rediculous to thing that you'd ever need more than 64K or to go much beyond 8-12Mhz.

This has to have been written in jest:
"WoW!!!!! This will be so useless. Who the heck needs a PC with four processors? Now thats just crazy."

It reminds me of the statements regarding memory in years gone by. Back then it was rediculous to thing that you'd ever need more than 64K or to go much beyond 8-12Mhz.

We are intering HD....no more analog,HD only.HD DVD,no loss recording and downloading,of music and video....thats just where were going so far and cant just stop and halt progress.Multi threading is sorta here ONLY because its new and barely useable,the demands are coming,theres always going to be the simple,which can be construed as cheap,to access the internet,play simple games,e-mail without HD formatting etc...but when al this and more is taken for granted soon....we will need it and I for one welcome it

My 5 year old laptop (Athlon 1.6GHz chip, 512MB ram) handles plenty of multitasking, except major video editing. I do that on the home PC (which is 2 years old, Athlon 2GHz chip) as well as playing movies and music for my home theater. It can play a movie smoothly while ripping another DVD to Xvid (AGK).

Some machines will need this new power, and some people who don't need it will buy it just to feel like they have more than someone or everyone else. But the mass market is looking for more efficiency and lower energy consumption, not more performance. But who knows, maybe multiple cores will enable some of them to be throttled off to save power. That is the real new race for the money, not MHz/GHz or number of cores, though they are still the race for bragging rights.

But you can brag all you want while I'm still using a more efficient machine to make my money, after your battery's already given its life to fragging your buddy's ego.

Why not just lower the cost of RAM and we can add more RAM in our systems. Seems RAM is what you need more of if you want to multitask. Then again, what do I know seing that I just work in the electronics design field. *throws hands in air*

I love AMD, im a die hard fan, but Intell and AMD need to give it a rest. Every time you look up there a new chip coming out. It does'nt give us consumers, know software developers to catch our breath.

One minute were writing for 32bit platforms, then 64, now, yikes 3 cores, 4x4. Enough is enough i say.

This all seems so comical.....

I still rin an Athlon64 2.2 GHz with 2 GB PC3200 just fine on any game I want to play......

There are too many tricks to keep your systtem optimized rather than think you need new system components....

Now my question: Wil these dual cpu's create heat problems ?????

4 cores will be heaven sent for me - I use my system for creating and producing music, and like the proverbial hard drive (regardless of the size of a hard drive - you'll always fill it), I always manage to run out of CPU headroom. The more cores the better, and I like AMDs approach where memory is not shared. My nirvana!

So now we need an ongoing list of software that is dual core capable, now quad, and now "x"-core capable. That and if I can specify what core does what...
Otherwise all this is poop for marketing sake.

"Otherwise all this is poop for marketing sake."

Exactly! That was my original point.
I do believe multi-core is the future and the sooner the better.
Someone said a CPU with a faster clock speed is always better. That's not true. It's where the term "Megaherz Myth" came from when you consider factors like the length of the command pipeline and FSB. Apple had a nice (dumbed-down) animation demonstrating the difference a few years ago. Granted, it was for the purposes of marketing hype, but as anyone who has compared AMD processors and Intel processors over the past 5 years or so will tell you, clock speeds are largely irrelevant. AMD kicked Intel's big butt all over the map with chips running at a slower clock speed.

I use four computers mosty for web surfing
the web, email, and simple games. The slowest
is a 750 p-3 the fastest is a 2.8 p-4 and for most of the task, all run as needed. most of
the people in their markets will get by with
single core, just fine. 16 cores for checking
email c'mon, as it is the p-4's need extra fans
so that they dont fry.

I do not understand what all the fuss is about. The speed all comes down to the weakest link. Point being that 4 cores are good with the right components. People can program the os into turning those 4 cores into one giant core or have programs take advantage of all four cores at the same time but your program is only gonna load as fast as the hard disk its accessing the data or the ram.

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