That motherboard is gonna be sweet, 2 socket 775 on one motherboard for less than 200 dollars, thats gonna be a monster.
Are the 775 chips used in this motherboard going to have to be "special" 775s that have the right CPUID bit set to be able to work with the motherboard? Or are we going to see a redux of the ABIT BP6 and friends, where one could make a dual-CPU unit with Celeron 300As for half the price of of "proper" expensive dual Slot 1 PIIs and PII Xeons setup? If any 775 chip would work, I'd be very tempted to buy one and load it up with two Q6600s and pay less than half of the cost of a dual Xeon E5345 and get better performance (and also avoid FB-DIMMs.)
I remember myself having a dual socket pentium pro, and dual socket 370 motherboards where popluar for a time. I even remeber back in the good socket a days you could use 2 durons on a dual socket a motherboard.
The PPros were expensive chips on a very unique socket- that's no different from the LGA 771 and Socket F units out there now. The 370s could use standard Pentium III CPUs though. But the real poor-man's setup was a pair of Celeron 300As on a dual Slot 1 mobo or trace-modded Athlon XP-Ms in a dual Socket A motherboard.
So why isnt amd working on a equivilant motherboard for am2+, instead of making people go to a whole new socket with limited upgradablility?
First, AMD isn't working on a dual AM2+ motherboard as the AM2+ socket only has pinouts for one HT link- to the chipset. Any dual-CPU AMD K8 or 10h setup needs not only that one HT link to the chipset but another to the other CPU for NUMA. To wire the AM2+ socket for DP operation, you'd need enough not connected (seen as "NC" in the pinout) pins to handle the other HT link. I don't know how many pins are NC, but I think HT needs about forty. Could it be done? Maybe. But why do that when Socket F is already around and working perfectly for that purpose?
Intel can get away with a dual socket setup as the socket just needs its power and FSB link. The CPU doesn't care if there is a second or split FSB emnating from the northbridge or not as it will behave the same. All you need is the proper chipset to handle two sockets.
And one more thing- the Socket L1 boards used for the Quad FX are simply Socket F sockets and the board will even support regular Opterons. There is some upgradeability as only a memory incompatibility will force AMD to change the socket, so the L1 sockets have some life left in them as DDR3 is not supposed to require a socket change. Plus, 775 is dead after the Wolfdales and Yorkfields ship anyway, so I think that the AMD socket will have a longer lifespan.
Also, on another subject, what happened to plans for the montreal processor(2 quads fused into a 8 core cpu, like intel did with it's quads), havent heard a word about it.
Patience, grasshopper. AMD hasn't even officially offered any quad-core CPUs for sale yet, let alone dual-quad 8-core CPUs. However, I did read that AMD has shipped some shipments of the Barcelonas for revenue in August and will start to sell them on the 11th. We'll see dual-quad-core AMD CPUs when AMD decides to show them and no earlier. AMD must have a stricter rein on their ESes than Intel does, or perhaps Intel intentionally lets a few go to stir up excitement among the fans.
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