AMD 4x4 Enthusiast

[Rob Williams]

No not that 4x4.. a new 4x4.

AMD announced today during a conference call that a new platform will be created and focused on just for the enthusiast desktop market. AMD has long been driving high-performance features on its Athlon family of processors and according to a number of surveys, most gamers are swaying towards AMD systems rather than Intel systems for gaming, or other application intense applications. Called 4x4, AMD's new platform brings along dual-socket motherboards.

http://www.dailytech.com/Article.aspx?newsid=2638

So, picture a dual socket motherboard.. like servers use. But they are not for servers, rather enthusiasts. Here's a catch, it looks like they will -only- accept FX processors, which means the FX-62 since it's currently the only AM2 processor.

Without doubt, a motherboard like this would cost at least $300. Couple two FX-62's together, which would be around $2,000. So, $2,300 for the motherboard and CPU's. Exactly -why- does an enthusiast need this? Apparently enthusiast to AMD means 'hardcore SPI clocker'.

Three things I find odd.. why the FX and not the AM2 desktop Dual Cores? There's no doubt that this would appeal to FAR more people if you could throw two 4000+'s in there. Of course, that would beat the pants off the FX-62, which is why they may be making it so exclusive.

AMD will also be releasing a new enthusiast focused chipset for the market...

Does this mean that the board will not feature nF5?

...which is designed to take non-ECC unbuffered DDR memory.

Huh, what? DDR1 on AM2?

[(cf)Eclipse]

it probably needs a new chipset to be able to deal with both cpu's... but at the same time, it shouldn't, cause from what i can tell, one cpu interfaces with another one that goes to the chipset?

i have a feeling the ddr thing is a typo... though it's entirely possible that the AM2's memory controller has ddr1 support remaining. the fact that amd itself is going to release an enthusiast level chipset is something that surprises me, and that i honestly didn't notice last time i read this. at the very least, more competition is good.

[madmat]

I think a motherboard that claims to be for "enthusiasts" and requires $2000 worth of CPUs to function is NOT a true enthusiast solution, it's just a way of strip mining cash from people that don't know any better.

[Rob Williams]

Usually I associate "Enthusiasts" with "Gamers". So how does even a Dual Core CPU benefit our gaming right now? It doesn't.. plain and simple. There are games out that do support Dual Core, I admit. There are even more on the way. But, we are in the 'bleeding edge' stage of that technology.

So throw four cores in a machine. That should technically speaking, make 0% difference in our games. Unless of course, AMD emulates both CPU's to act as one. Then we may see differences in CPU intensive games.. like HL2. But who has a computer so crappy, that it can't run HL2 reliably?

[Tech-Daddy]

I read somewhere that the second socket "may" be used to allow for the installation of secondary processing equipment.... think "co-processor"... think... maybe... a Physics chip that has direct access to the HT on the CPU...

*that* would kick ass.

All rumor and speculation at this point though.