Discussing Thread for Torenzza a.k.a 4x4

[Viperabyss]

Recently, AMD unofficially announced their battle plan to counter Intel's Conroe beast, the torenzza, or 4x4. i want to know what ppl think of it. please share your thoughts, as well as other technical specifications. thanks.

FYI... sharikou and MMM had already jump with joy, shouting, "1FX is not enough, but 2FX are surely gonna take Conroe down!!"

 

[sdrawkcaBgoD]

From what I've heard, it's actually a 4X4X4X4X4 system. That means 4 CPU cores, 4 GPU cores, 4 gigs of RAM, and 4 hard drives and "4 times the fun". That sounds like one hell of a lot of money to invest in a gaming rig. I say it's not going to go over very well. I for one will never be able to afford it. *sigh*

Edit: Added link, added another X4.

 

[shinigamiX]

This is great for people who have oil wells in their yards. Like me. I have 10.

 

[old_times]

I don't know if Intel had come up with the same idea putting a couple of P Ds to beat AMD's top of the line CPUs what would happen. What happend to all that performance per Watt, bang for the buck and cooler operation that took AMD to these days? :roll:

,,

 

[RichPLS]

Seems to me that they spent to much time crowing of their success, expecting Intel to grovel in disappointment, instead they were busy working to deploy an affordable FX-62 killer and have caught AMD with their trousers down...

 

[sdrawkcaBgoD]

Agreed. Nothing says desperation like throwing more of the same on one platform and expecting people to buy it just because it's an EE (Extreme Enthusiast) rig.

 

[TechnologyCoordinator]

4x4 Considerations:

- It will be of great benefit if programs are written to take advantage of multi-processors
- If programs, specifically games, are not written for multi-processors 4x4 would mean having 1 busy core and 3 idle ones
- You will need double the RAM for this platform
- I don't think bandwidth will be an issue
- I would have preferred a better solution such as better/faster processors (Core 2 Duo Double Duce II or whatever they are calling Conroe now)

 

[Viperabyss]

4x4 Considerations:

- It will be of great benefit if programs are written to take advantage of multi-processors
- If programs, specifically games, are not written for multi-processors 4x4 would mean having 1 busy core and 3 idle ones
- You will need double the RAM for this platform
- I don't think bandwidth will be an issue
- I would have preferred a better solution such as better/faster processors (Core 2 Duo Double Duce II or whatever they are calling Conroe now)

lolz.. do you know that both MMM and Sharikou believed 4x4 will completly wipe out Conroe once and for all? sharikou even called 4x4 a permernant solution, when conroe is a stopgap solution.

 

[jaguarskx]

Recently, AMD unofficially announced their battle plan to counter Intel's Conroe beast, the torenzza, or 4x4. i want to know what ppl think of it. please share your thoughts, as well as other technical specifications. thanks.

FYI... sharikou and MMM had already jump with joy, shouting, "1FX is not enough, but 2FX are surely gonna take Conroe down!!"

I think I can afford one of these rigs as long as I can moonlight as a smuggler of "conflict diamonds".

 

[RichPLS]

or if you simply start suppling some of that good stuff shakira and MMC have been obviously been doing, you would be rolling then...

 

[theaxemaster]

TC is pretty much spot on. If software goes multithread, AMD wins. If it stays relatively single-threaded, intel wins (based on what we can see from their forcasts right now). Who knows, maybe k8l will be an impressive chip in the single core game, maybe not. But intel already has theirs coming out, AMD is behind and they know it.

 

[casewhite]

Recently, AMD unofficially announced their battle plan to counter Intel's Conroe beast, the torenzza, or 4x4. i want to know what ppl think of it. please share your thoughts, as well as other technical specifications. thanks.

FYI... sharikou and MMM had already jump with joy, shouting, "1FX is not enough, but 2FX are surely gonna take Conroe down!!"[/quote

One dual core FX with the coprocessor will do just fine. With the coprocesor you today are able to do about 10.3 gigaflops per second. Look at what the best out there can do right now. The 10.3 is not an imaginary number but real world today. That is the computing power of 1 opteron with one Cray SeaStar chip. For those who want to get an idea of what this means go to cray.com hit the XT3 link and then download the pdf for specs. 96 opterons with SeaStars hit 998 gigaflops in one cabinet. The Torrenza architecture is essentially the same. Since the coprocessor will cost you about 25-50% of the cost of the CPU and will double the processing power you have quite an array of options. Since it looks like K8L will have 4 HTT channels you could do a George Lucas or Boeing and buy 1 quad core Opteron(the current arrangement uses two dual cores) set up with a grahics physics coprocessor and a rendering coprocessor and a good PCI-E card and double the performance of a Quad SLI for a lot less money. Granted they did it in cabinets of 96 but that gives them enormous processing power for graphics and CAD. You don't need four of everything and you can get by with buying the bottom of the line K8L, sort of like buying the Opty 165 now. Memory is the only area where you will be penalized for not having 4. It should cut the amount spent on graphics cards down and increase performance since the physics and rendering coprocessors will be tied directly to the CPU and not off on the PCI-E bus. If AMD does the reverse hyperthreading then you won't care whether an app is single threaded or multithreaded. So figure what 15-20 gigaflops of processing power on your desk top will do for you.

 

[jkflipflop98]

It's not the silver bullet that you make it out to be. A specialized co-processor is really good at one or two things, and thats it. So if your thing is atomic lookahead equasions, then ya. . . you'll double your processing power. Excel and FEAR will see no improvements.

If I could drop an nvidia chip in the other socket that could encode/decode hires media, and maybe help crunch some triangles, then I'd buy it.

 

[BaronMatrix]

Recently, AMD unofficially announced their battle plan to counter Intel's Conroe beast, the torenzza, or 4x4. i want to know what ppl think of it. please share your thoughts, as well as other technical specifications. thanks.

FYI... sharikou and MMM had already jump with joy, shouting, "1FX is not enough, but 2FX are surely gonna take Conroe down!!"

AMD never specifically said 4x4 was to compete with Conroe people just assumed it.

 

[gr8mikey]

4X4 will offer incredible multi-threading/multi-tasking performance no doubt, but I can't see it ever making it to the masses. It will find its niche, but that will encompass only enthusiasts and professionals in my opinion.

 

[hergieburbur]

Recently, AMD unofficially announced their battle plan to counter Intel's Conroe beast, the torenzza, or 4x4. i want to know what ppl think of it. please share your thoughts, as well as other technical specifications. thanks.

FYI... sharikou and MMM had already jump with joy, shouting, "1FX is not enough, but 2FX are surely gonna take Conroe down!!"

You do know that torrenze isn't the same as 4x4 technology right? Torrenza is actually an open platform standard that allows for myriad different coprocessors to be placed in the MB sockets and communicate via HTT. Torrenza is geared more toward the specialized computing and server space than desktops. It is not meant to be target Conroe.

4x4 is just an early implementation of Torrenza that is basically either a knee-jerk reaction to Conroe, or a bet on multi-threaded apps becoming vastly more prominent, depending on how you want to read it.

 

[BaronMatrix]

Recently, AMD unofficially announced their battle plan to counter Intel's Conroe beast, the torenzza, or 4x4. i want to know what ppl think of it. please share your thoughts, as well as other technical specifications. thanks.

FYI... sharikou and MMM had already jump with joy, shouting, "1FX is not enough, but 2FX are surely gonna take Conroe down!!"

Ars Technica has a story about AMD/ATi and using GPUs ine the cHT socket just like I said would happen. They say it's a road to travel because Intel doesn't have cHT but I still say next year expect to see at least ONE high end video card in a socket.

 

[jkflipflop98]

Recently, AMD unofficially announced their battle plan to counter Intel's Conroe beast, the torenzza, or 4x4. i want to know what ppl think of it. please share your thoughts, as well as other technical specifications. thanks.

FYI... sharikou and MMM had already jump with joy, shouting, "1FX is not enough, but 2FX are surely gonna take Conroe down!!"

Ars Technica has a story about AMD/ATi and using GPUs ine the cHT socket just like I said would happen. They say it's a road to travel because Intel doesn't have cHT but I still say next year expect to see at least ONE high end video card in a socket.

Great idea! Then the video chip can saturate the bus talking to ram that's 5x slower than it needs to operate all the while choking bandwidth away from the general processor.

I can't wait for this next step!

:lol:

 

[Action_Man]

Hurrah someone else who understands this!

 

[gOJDO]

Great idea! Then the video chip can saturate the bus talking to ram that's 5x slower than it needs to operate all the while choking bandwidth away from the general processor.

I can't wait for this next step!

:lol:

Quite right
Torenzza in 4x4 is a just a lot of aditional marketing and a lot of expencive hardware connected to work theoreticly but not practicly to improve general system performance in any reasonable and noticable amount.
Let's see what HTT3 can do for Torenzza?
Four links, each fullduplex 32bit 2.6GHz providing 10.4GB/s in each direction, 20.8GB/s total.
One link used for connecting the 2 CPUs, two for connecting to the two PPUs(1 link per PPU) and one for connecting to a chipset.
2P K8, 2 IMCs each handling (lets guess) 128bit DDR2-SLI-1066 or 17GB/s. In 2P K8 with NUMA, each CPU will benefit only 10.4GB/s memory bandwidth. It is becouse the limit of HTT3, 10.4GB/s total bandwidth per each direction per link.
Processors used in modern single GPU graphics cards today are handling more than 50GB/s. In the time when Torenzza 4x4 will be available for us the GPU/PPU cards will be dual processor handling more bandwidth each.
Each time they will request data from system RAM, the CPU involved in memory tranffic will suffer for RAM bandiwidth.
So, we can not expect from them to boost the CPU performance in any noticable way.

 

[chunkymonster]

Ars Technica has a story about AMD/ATi and using GPUs ine the cHT socket just like I said would happen. They say it's a road to travel because Intel doesn't have cHT but I still say next year expect to see at least ONE high end video card in a socket.

Good article...nice speculation...this is a technology that I would like to see developed...IF there were an aquisition or strategic partnership between AMD/ATI, they would have all the pieces under one roof to make this a reality...I see this as forward and "out of the box" thinking...this idea and it's merits can be debated over and over and goodness knows the fanboys in these forums know better than anyone else ...however, that does not mean it is not an idea worth developing and implementing...

Great idea! Then the video chip can saturate the bus talking to ram that's 5x slower than it needs to operate all the while choking bandwidth away from the general processor.

I can't wait for this next step!

Sarcasm aside, if memory or bandwidth (as it stands today) is the issue, then that's not a really an issue...memory, buses, cpus, gpus will continue to get bigger/better/faster/cheaper...such is the nature of technology, check it out...

I can't see Torrenza making it to the enthusiast desktop...seems to be better suited to server farms and research where AMD can take advantage of scaling...really, that's all Torrenza is anyway, a means to leverage HTT and scaling processing power...

 

[GloriosoSLB]

I don’t know why the other posters are discussing bandwidth, when it as nothing to do with this.

Because if one processors communicate with other at 6.4GB/s and this will make them slow, then GPU where also limited by the PCIe FSB.
CPU where limited by FSB.
CPU where limited by RAM bandwidth.
...
In the end we where limited by the bandwidth available in the Floppy disk cable (512kb/s)...


Also torenzza isn’t 4x4.

I think 4x4 is a bad idea like it is SLI, dual core (P4 D version), dual ... everything that goes the easy way (COPY->PASTE) is bad, I can’t find nothing innovative in that.
However I admit that the capability of connecting a co processor throw the HTX slot to communicate directly with the processor is a good idea, by using the socket you lose a socket.

For example the specialized co processor can make calculations up to 100x faster than the processor and then send the result directly into the processor.

To bad Intel doesn’t bring any kind of innovation with their new core architecture (old since core (duo) is already on laptops).

 

[itguy]

4X4 will offer incredible multi-threading/multi-tasking performance no doubt, but I can't see it ever making it to the masses. It will find its niche, but that will encompass only enthusiasts and professionals in my opinion.

I agree with this. Except I would add all the rich suburban kids to the 4X4 route. These guys will be split. Some will go Conroe but many will want to show off a 2P 4X4 system to wow their friends.

As for the longevity of the 4X4 platform. It could turn into something amazing like when adding a GPU in the second socket or using a future HTX slot to increase performance. Or, if 4x4 is not accepted, and AMD get's seriously hurt financially by Conroe, then it may fade away and never get the industry support for it to realize it's capabilities. This would be a big negative for all consumers because it would mean Intel won and reestablished their industry stranglehold which means less competition and higher prices for less performance.

You know, the usual products you get with monopolies that control 85% of the market ecosystem.

 

[spud]

4X4 will offer incredible multi-threading/multi-tasking performance no doubt, but I can't see it ever making it to the masses. It will find its niche, but that will encompass only enthusiasts and professionals in my opinion.

I agree with this. Except I would add all the rich suburban kids to the 4X4 route. These guys will be split. Some will go Conroe but many will want to show off a 2P 4X4 system to wow their friends.

As for the longevity of the 4X4 platform. It could turn into something amazing like when adding a GPU in the second socket or using a future HTX slot to increase performance. Or, if 4x4 is not accepted, and AMD get's seriously hurt financially by Conroe, then it may fade away and never get the industry support for it to realize it's capabilities. This would be a big negative for all consumers because it would mean Intel won and reestablished their industry stranglehold which means less competition and higher prices for less performance.

You know, the usual products you get with monopolies that control 85% of the market ecosystem.

Well if you buy a dual socket woodcrest board which is all 4x4 is. Claiming a dual socket workstation configuration is new makes me laugh.

 

[Action_Man]

But its done by AMD so it must be new!