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4x4 posts

NEC's biggest pro LCD yet: 82-inch LCD8205

by Richard Lawler posted Sep 17th 2008 at 9:19AM

Adding to its line of professional displays, NEC is bringing the LCD8205 to 2008 Digital Signage Expo East. We've seen bigger in the consumer space, but when you've just got to have 4x4 tile support for a max 328-inch (diagonal) display, refreshingly realistic 5,000:1 claimed contrast ratio and 1920x1080 resolution, there's not much better. At $54,999 each, it's unlikely we'll find one under the tree when it releases in December but catching a peek (and fogging up a display window or two) is slightly more attainable goal.

[Via CE Pro]

AMD shows off Barcelona server chips, garners mixed reviews

by Darren Murph posted Dec 1st 2006 at 2:04AM

With Intel giving its shareholders some awfully great news to savor over the holidays, AMD had to hit back with some news of its own, but you'll definitely get a different vibe from reading ExtremeTech's take on the firm's recently showcased Barcelona than from the horse's own mouth. While AMD parades its 65nm chip as "the world's first native quad-core x86 server processor," and boasts about its "significant advancements in performance per watt capabilities," we've reason to wonder if things aren't a bit sugarcoated. While the wafer was demonstrated as utilizing "all 16 cores" and being a seamless upgrade from "dual-core to quad-core", hard facts (read: the much anticipated benchmarks) were curiously absent. Aside from injecting onlookers with more of the same technical minutiae we've seen over the past few months, AMD didn't exactly flesh out a lot of new details to chew on, but ExtremeTech's reference system "was the loudest they'd ever had in their office," and sucked down nearly 600 watts of power with just two HDDs and a single graphics card. So while we're firmly withholding judgment until its officially released, we'd say AMD still has a bit of tweaking to do before the competition rolls in.

UPDATE: Looks like we mistook the quad-core Opteron and the Quad FX (announced on the same day, nonetheless) chips as one in the same, when (thankfully) they're not, but those eying the recently-released FX-based desktops may want to think about how much noise they're willing to put up with before throwing down on a new machine.

Read - AMD Press Release
Read - ExtremeTech's Hands-on Testing

AMD's Quad FX platform: some details and doubts

by Ryan Block posted Nov 30th 2006 at 3:11AM

So we know AMD was launching the Quad FX platform this week (that officially happened in America today), but we were a little hard up for info on what that actually entailed. Well, here's what's what: the obviously enthusiast platform aims to please by eschewing AMD's own lower performing (yet wholly owned) ATI products for NVIDIA and its nForce 680a-based chipsets (yes, we know), and will feature quad and octo-core support (yep). They're touting twelve SATA connections for up to 9TB of storage, 20 USB 2.0 channels, four gig Ethernet ports, four or eight monitors powered by up to four PCI-E cards, and Dual Socket Direct Connect (DSDC) Architecture designed for optimized performance (or so they tell us). What wasn't clear, however, is that US pricing on the FX-70 series chips are for bundles; helping put one of those fours in 4x4, AMD's FX-70 (2.6GHz), FX-72 (2.8GHz), and FX-74 (3.0GHz) processors -- which use the same Socket F previous Opterons have -- will be sold in pairs for $600, $800, and $1000, respectively, literally doubling the value. Affordable is, of course, par for AMD -- except for one thing. Although we haven't tested these new chips ourselves, PC Perspective is reporting that an Impress study showed these new FX-series processors to be monstrously less efficient in cycles per watt of power consumption than Intel's. One graph (shown after the break) has an FX-74 gobbling what looks like near double the juice of a Core 2 Extreme QX6700 chip for comparable (or lesser) performance values. Whether that will hold you back from (re-)investing in AMD's new platform is up to you, but we know you're not the type to buy blind anyway.

Read - AMD Quad FX release
Read - Impress tests [Via PC Perspective]

Continue reading AMD's Quad FX platform: some details and doubts

Here comes Quad FX: AMD's 4x4 platform gets "official"

by Paul Miller posted Nov 29th 2006 at 11:08AM

Sure, we knew 4x4 was on the way, and we had an idea AMD was prepping a fancy new "Quad FX" moniker for the spankin' new chipsets, but we were still waiting for the stamp of legitimacy, which just came in the form of an AMD unveil this morning in Japan. The new chipset integrates NVIDIA's nForce 680a SLI chipset with AMD's fresh Athlon 64 FX-70 dual-core processors to great effect, with clock speeds hitting 2.6, 2.8 and 3.0GHz for the FX-70, FX-72 and FX-74 processors. The 90nm chips include 2MB of L2 cache, consume no more than 125W of power, and can support 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM, all based on AMD's Socket F workstation infrastructure. Of course, all this integrated action doesn't come cheap -- or tiny, as the picture above proves -- since the CPUs will run you $599, $799 and $999 respectively. By the time you buy two of 'em, plus 4 NVIDIA cards and a motherboard to hold 'em all, your bank account will be hurting mightily, but if cost is no concern, there's no arguing with the power potential here.

[Via El Reg]

AMD's 4x4 setup to start at "about $1000"

by Cyrus Farivar posted Nov 10th 2006 at 6:45PM

Over the last few months, we've enjoyed snippets of information about AMD's new 4x4 platform, but until today we didn't know the speed of the chips, nor their prices. TG Daily just got all the info from a company event in Munich; the 4x4 will launch on November 14, with three different models of 125-watt FX processors: the 2.6GHz FX-72, 2.8GHz FX-74, and 3.0GHz FX-76. Further, the site also confirmed with AMD that the entry-level chips would go for "about $1000," and acknowledged that there still aren't that many pieces of software that can take advantage of two cores on two chips, besides Windows Vista Ultimate Edition. So the short of it is, that totally decked out gamer rig -- with a 4x4 powering the whole unit -- isn't going to come cheap.

ATI to announce "Stream Computing" on September 29

by Cyrus Farivar posted Sep 21st 2006 at 2:02PM

Fresh off its approved merger with AMD, ATI apparently has some tricks up its sleeve and will reveal its hand at a special event in San Francisco on September 29. ATI is hyping something called "Stream Computing," which uses GPGPU (general purpose graphics processor units) to run normal code on graphics hardware. GPGPU (couldn't they have come up with a better acronym?) is something that's been bouncing around the computer science community for a little while now, and may be on its way to becoming feasible -- The Reg says this technology has the potential to kick up performance by a factor of 10 and possibly as high as 30 in some computing applications (like, say, running a huuuuge freakin' Excel 'sheet). Now that may be true, but it's like those floating point specs that Apple is always parading around -- those numbers may hold water in the lab for very specific applications, but mere mortals probably won't see that performance difference anytime soon.

Intel fights AMD's 4x4 with new quad-core tech

by Paul Miller posted Jul 21st 2006 at 9:35AM

There aren't many arguments that Intel has a winner -- however temporary -- with their new Conroe Core 2 Duo chips, but they aren't relaxing just yet. With the oncoming threat of AMD's 4x4 chips in the performance/gamer space, Intel is getting a bit of quad-core action of their own with the new Kentsfield and Clovertown setups for consumer and server use respectively. Originally due in the first half of 2007, near when AMD's "Conroe killer" K8L was set to drop, both have been bumped up to fourth quarter '06 status, which sure has Intel looking smug. There are differences, however, in approach: Intel's Kentsfield architecture squeezes four cores into one socket, as compared to the dual sockets used by AMD's 4x4. This means the Intel chips will have less memory and frontside bus bandwidth available to each core, which will hurt them some in the performance race, but it also means cost savings that could give them an edge in the bang for buck arena. If anything, this is an indication of the intense competition going on for our chip dollars, and even if the quad-core war is a bit of a semantic one, we'll accept all the Photoshop crunching and AI processing power these guys want to push our way.

AMD's "4 x 4" platform pairs 2 dual-core CPUs, 4 GPUs

by Evan Blass posted Jun 2nd 2006 at 6:03PM

Gamers gather 'round, for we have a tale of a new platform from AMD that will surely get your pulses racing, at least if the idea of having two dual-core processors and four graphics cards in one machine sounds as appealing to you as it does to us. Known as the "4 x 4" Enthusiasts Platform (four cores plus four GPUs -- we know, it's a bit of a stretch), the setup will allow manufacturers to offer configurations which users can upgrade over time, so consumers could start out with one dual-core chip and and one or more video cards, for example, instead of laying down what will likely be loads of cash on a maxed-out system. Another interesting bit of info revealed at the AMD analyst day in Austin, Texas was the fact that dual ATI Crossfire configurations can be used with 4 x 4, which indicates that AMD's possible acquisition target is probably working on a quad-SLI-esque solution to match rival nVidia. So start saving your pennies, dear gamers, because things are looking to get mighty interesting this year.