AMD's 4x4 Supports Four Graphic Cards

Sledgehammer70Sledgehammer70 California Icrontian
edited October 2006 in Science & Tech
From the looks of it Nvidia's partnership with AMD has grown four more legs in the support of the 4x4x4. As AMD asked Nvidia to create a chipset for its Quadfather launch.

News has hit the web that Nvidia has created the new platform for AMD for the 4x4 launch. The 4x4 plays host to 2 Opteron socket "F"'s on the same Motherboard which will than be upgradeable to AMD official Quad Core CPU which will be released next year. The system will not require registered ECC memory as rumored over the last few months, but will ask for regular DDR2 memory such as Corsair, OCZ, & Geil all provide currently.

The system will not only support quad-core Barcelona CPUs, but will support four graphics cards at the same time. Since the 680a chipset is created from a north bridge and south bridge chipset, there were enough PCIe lanes available to use four PEG (PCI Express Graphics) slots. Two slots come as x16 and two come as x8.
Since Nvidia is touting networking interfaces as an important point for games, you will not be surprised that this feature has got a significant upgrade. The Nforce 680a chipset will be also able to serve as a hardware router, since the chipset comes with no less than four Gigabit Ethernet ports, all using the well-known features of the "Nv Gb Engine".

It will support 12 S-ATA ports and has the ability to have two RAID5 arrays of six drives.

In case you're wondering how this all is possible, the answer is simple. The 680a chipset is nothing more than two nForce 590SLI chips placed on the same motherboard. Hypertransport is very flexible and ATI Crossfire is not mentioned anywhere.
So AMD new 4x4 platform seems to be shaping up quit nicely, offering more features than today’s setups I can see gamers jumping all over this one. 4 - 8800GTX's in SLI under one hood should be showing their faces sooner than later.

Source: The Inquirer

Comments

  • muddocktormuddocktor
    edited October 2006
    Sounds like it would also make one hell of a serious rendering workstation board too.
  • RADARADA Apple Valley, CA Member
    edited October 2006
    Sounds like we'll need to build our own backyard powerstation/nuclear cooling tower to use it..... the new cpus are running cooler, but four GPUs or 3 GPUs and a physics card....sounds mondo-toasty...


    ...probably won't pass CA fire codes either....:aol::nudge::)
  • OrianeOriane Turn around.
    edited October 2006
    Sounds like it could be quite a folder, but please clarify something for me-
    Sledgehammer70 wrote:
    ... The 4x4 plays host to 2 Opteron socket "F"'s on the same Motherboard ...

    Are you saying it is a multi-processor design ... as in 8 (2x4) possible CPU cores someday? I must have missed it- I didn't get that from the article.

    EDIT: Nice line about ATI compatibility :?
  • Sledgehammer70Sledgehammer70 California Icrontian
    edited October 2006
    It has 2 socket F's which can hold 2 FX Dual Core CPU's and in the near future 2 Quad Core CPU's. which means a possible 8 cores total in the future...

    As of now AMD has not said anything about ATI support. They are pushing SLI with the Nvidia chipset... But I am sure they will have their own ATI variant.
  • Sledgehammer70Sledgehammer70 California Icrontian
    edited October 2006
    RADA wrote:
    Sounds like we'll need to build our own backyard powerstation/nuclear cooling tower to use it..... the new cpus are running cooler, but four GPUs or 3 GPUs and a physics card....sounds mondo-toasty...


    ...probably won't pass CA fire codes either....:aol::nudge::)

    No one said you had to have more than 1 card :) Buit the option to add more is always good for upgrade paths :)
  • BuddyJBuddyJ Dept. of Propaganda OKC Icrontian
    edited October 2006
    With the option for four cards, what kind of board real estate does this have? Maybe I'm behind the times, but it seems to me that with 2x height high-end graphics cards and 4 PCI-e slots, you'd kill any chance of having extra slots free for other cards.
  • RWBRWB Icrontian
    edited October 2006
    That would make one hell of a router...
  • OrianeOriane Turn around.
    edited October 2006
    Buddy Jesus wrote:
    With the option for four cards, what kind of board real estate does this have?

    I got curious too so I got a not-very-good picture (courtesy AMDzone). I also hear rumor that they might have a release in November?
    RWB wrote:
    That would make one hell of a router...

    ;D Hopefully with 4 nVidia cards your web browser will never have looked better too.
  • RWBRWB Icrontian
    edited October 2006
    I really wish they would have 8 DIMM's on that beast.... and some way to handle 8GB+ of RAM..... I'd might be inclined to have a nice small virtual RAM drive setup :P
  • mondimondi Icrontian
    edited October 2006
    RWB wrote:
    I really wish they would have 8 DIMM's on that beast.... and some way to handle 8GB+ of RAM..... I'd might be inclined to have a nice small virtual RAM drive setup :P

    http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/07042003/products.htm#hyperosHDIIproduct
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