"The new motherboards will be AM2 based, and take new AM2 FX-62 and higher.."
But the description that follows "a whole new design" sounds just like current Opteron multiprocessor designs.AMD says that 4x4 is not simply workstation and server technology reduced down to consumer level, but is in fact, a whole new design. The company indicated that the new 4x4 chipset will be able to allow each processor core to have direct access to memory, and to have direct access to each other. The technology is called Direct Connect, and according to AMD, will be able to give huge boost to performance over traditional multi-socket platforms.
I'm not entirely certain that it requires much of a change in the chipset.Karma Police said:But isn't it really up do the chipset designers to make a MB that supports two AM2 processors? How long will it take to have nVidia/ATi/Via come out with one after AMD announces they support two AM2 chips?
Karma Police said:But isn't it really up do the chipset designers to make a MB that supports two AM2 processors?
nutball said:Could be marketing semantics. "Traditional multi-socket platforms" = Intel's way of doing things. It's hard to see why, if this tech really if the bee knees, it's introduced on a gaming platform first, not in servers and workstations where it actually might make a meaningful difference.
nutball said:Yeah, but this will to some extent negate the advantage that Opteron has had over Xeon up to now, ie. multiple independent memory busses, one per socket. The secondary pair of cores would be very much second-class citizens, not having their own memory bus. Four cores sharing a single memory bus could present some real scalability issues if your problem doesn't fit in L2 cache.
4x4 will involve dual-socket, enthusiast-class motherboards and dual-core Athlon 64 FX processors
Yes it's for the enthusiast populace.Alstrong said:Techreport on 4x4...
I mean that 2S + 1 common dual-channel memory bus will be more than enough - it will give same BW per core as current s939 2S motherboards. Unless CPUs are clocked much higher (btw anyone noticed that AMD claims 65nm CPus on the way? "in production from Chartered Semi" - so less than 3 months before we see them), there is no need for more BW, and this will make motherboards a bit cheaperChalnoth said:If they're using two sockets, then each socket will have access to its own dual-channel memory bus. In the future, with quad-core, yes, DDR2 will likely make an impact, for the reason you describe. But this sounds rather different.
Since it's the same socket, each CPU will have its own dual-channel memory controller, and each socket will have the connections for a dual-channel memory connection. So I would consider it very likely that we'd be talking a dual-channel connection to each individual CPU.chavvdarrr said:I mean that 2S + 1 common dual-channel memory bus will be more than enough - it will give same BW per core as current s939 2S motherboards. Unless CPUs are clocked much higher (btw anyone noticed that AMD claims 65nm CPus on the way? "in production from Chartered Semi" - so less than 3 months before we see them), there is no need for more BW, and this will make motherboards a bit cheaper
Socket 939 never reserved any pins for more than just one HT link, although it easily has enough pins that it would have been possible for AMD to support an additional link if they wanted to (the older socket 940 did provide both 3 full HT links and a 128-bit ddr interface).Chalnoth said:Yeah, I thought socket 939 had that already...