The FX is marketed specifically toward gamers though, is it not?
Workstation users would be running a dual Opteron setup...it seems that 4x4 doesn't really have a place.
And c'mon - 4x4 not marketed at gamers...so those FOUR GRAPHICS CHIPS are just for show??
Enthusiasts and megataskers do play games, and this is a way to IMMEDIATELY GET 60-80% increase in multithreaded environments, but depending upon the necessity I would recommend this over Opteron.
For a small engr shop that does CFD or modeling I would say go for it, but for something like LucasArts, I would recommend Opteron.
For a small business that needs a less expensive Exchange\Web server, I would recommend 4x4, but for a midsized company's mission critical servers I would recommend Opteron.
For a home based business that needs horsepower and shares a role as a gaming machine, I would recommend 4x4.
Just because it has 4 slot doesn't mean it comes with 4 GPUs. There is no driver that works with 4 GPUs yet anyway (7950GX2 only uses 2 slots). nVidia is working on one and it should land for Vista.
I have an SLI board and only one GPU. My 4x4 setup will only have on DX10 card. I hope this initiative also pushes NICs and sound cards to PCIe as 4 slots are already taken by PCIe.
Anyway, in this case the gaming scores won't go down as they seem to with C2Q.
Check out Tom's review from Thurs. It may even gain as adding chips increases bandwidth with AMD.
This shows that AMD is not far behind with FX62 in multithreaded environments and the added bandwidth may allow for MORE than twice the difference in certain situations.
I wouldn't be surprised if the high end switched to two sockets because of 4x4. Especially since you are GUARANTEED octal in 07. By the time 08 gets here, the prices for 8 cores should be the same as highend dual core now.
4x4. A great idea whose time has come. Almost.