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Quad FX Dead? Do We Care?

RamonGTP said:
Unless AMD was able to get Quad FX down in price and up in performance, there is no practical use for it and there is no reason to keep it around. It isn't about haveing foresight, it's about what works and what doesnt. Quad FX might have potential, but potential alone is not good enough to merit it's existance.
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Once again i reiterate upon the fact of a matured and refined platform. You make it seem like quadcores first launched at 300ish dollars a year ago. And as if middle of the pack dual cores were equally as cheap a year ago.

One would hope that with a more refined platform things would be much more cheaper and practical. And I'm pretty sure everyone and their mama was writing off the pentium d and its plaspmous philosophy yet look at things now? Not only did it give Intel a marketing edge in their next gen chips but it brought you 300 dollar quad cores a year earlier than we probably would be seeing them had Intel decided to abandon the idea of packing two dies on one chip.

Seriously people, foresight. If people were this narrow minded 10ish years ago we'd still be gaming on igp and 2d graphics telling ourselves, "why the hell would we ever want or need an add-on graphics card? Silly rabbit!"

EDIT: Also to add to previous examples of stone stepping in pc technology in recent times. Look at sli. When first launched unless you were about to shell out a grand it was pointless. Now? Sli can be had for less than half that price. Why? Because the platform has been matured and refined over time.
 
VMaxx said:
I'd be more impressed with multicore video card than CPU for gaming purposes. Right now I don't see a big leap forward in performance with multiple cpu cores given I still run an ancient processor but a decent video card and do just fine with most games still.

Now if they put out a 8 core video card and don't make me use some stupid SLI crap driver, I'd be more impressed. SLI enabled and tuned via drivers seems to be a disaster. Give me multicore goodness with the synced cores processing video ram at near X times the speed (given the number of cores), that's where money is.
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the idea of "multi cored" video cards has been asked before and I seem to be the only one to come up with this answer (maybe I'm just wrong).

comparing GPUs to CPUs, each "CPU core" is just another "GPU pipe". To that end the 8800GTX is a 128 "cored" monster --and that does mean something. A dual core CPU from either intel or amd has the abillity to execute two threads simultaneously, aka in parallel. The 8800GTX has the ability to execute 128 shader operations, simultaneously, aka in parallel.
 
I own 3 4x4 based machines, and one Intel Quad. There are applications where the memory bandwidth of the 4x4 makes it preferable to Intel Quad-core.

Without going into huge detail, 4x4 was wonderful when it came out, at least for me. It runs four Virtual machines for me, with my custom application running in each. It is a wonderfully flexible platform. I load the PCIe slots with Ethernet, and the numerous SATA ports make storage a snap, too. The thing is an I/O monster, very stable (although hot and power-hungry), and it runs my app like a dream.

No gaming for me - in fact, the lone PCI slot is where I stuck graphic cards, and only to get console under Linux. This is probably not what AMD intended, but it was a pretty good deal shortly after the platform launched - AMD socket "L" got real, real cheap, and was definitely more Linux friendly than Intel's quads. This is, of course, a moot point now - Intel is now the better deal.

I'll be very disappointed if AMD reneges on the promise of 8-core. If nothing else, they should push Asus to do a BIOS update to allow us existing 4x4 fans to run quad-core Opterons (much as the 4x4 runs dual core Opterons, even if it is unofficially unsupported). If they don't do that, they'll certainly be losing a die-hard AMD client and evangelist aka fanboy.

I don't really care if AMD ever launches a new 4x4, but they should not break the promises to the existing users. These are the folks that help sell their bread-n-butter chips, and they'll be losing some great unpaid PR and sales if they don't do something.
 
hirschma said:
I don't really care if AMD ever launches a new 4x4, but they should not break the promises to the existing users. These are the folks that help sell their bread-n-butter chips, and they'll be losing some great unpaid PR and sales if they don't do something.
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AMD I would think,has to be very careful about exactly what they spend cash on right now,and this platform is not worth throwing more bad money after.
 
overkill???

I thought this was HardOCP.. sorry must have clicked on the wrong forums.
 
hirschma said:
I own 3 4x4 based machines, and one Intel Quad. There are applications where the memory bandwidth of the 4x4 makes it preferable to Intel Quad-core.

Without going into huge detail, 4x4 was wonderful when it came out, at least for me. It runs four Virtual machines for me, with my custom application running in each. It is a wonderfully flexible platform. I load the PCIe slots with Ethernet, and the numerous SATA ports make storage a snap, too. The thing is an I/O monster, very stable (although hot and power-hungry), and it runs my app like a dream.

No gaming for me - in fact, the lone PCI slot is where I stuck graphic cards, and only to get console under Linux. This is probably not what AMD intended, but it was a pretty good deal shortly after the platform launched - AMD socket "L" got real, real cheap, and was definitely more Linux friendly than Intel's quads. This is, of course, a moot point now - Intel is now the better deal.

I'll be very disappointed if AMD reneges on the promise of 8-core. If nothing else, they should push Asus to do a BIOS update to allow us existing 4x4 fans to run quad-core Opterons (much as the 4x4 runs dual core Opterons, even if it is unofficially unsupported). If they don't do that, they'll certainly be losing a die-hard AMD client and evangelist aka fanboy.

I don't really care if AMD ever launches a new 4x4, but they should not break the promises to the existing users. These are the folks that help sell their bread-n-butter chips, and they'll be losing some great unpaid PR and sales if they don't do something.
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Yeah, thing is, you're a power-user for whom this tech has a practical use, the stuff that's (apparently) been ditched was being pitched at the normal/enthusiast user market, for whom gaming is the primary, everyday, heavy-load application.

For that market and purpose the technology is effectively useless, even if it was cheaper, as pointed out earlier in the thread on a practical level even the most stressful multi-threaded games aren't taxing current quad-cores and GPUs remain the limiting factor, as has been the case for a long time now.

Another 4 CPU cores won't improve image quality or fps one jot, which is the concern of the market that they were trying to sell it to.
 
I don't see the point of having two processors for anything but the very high end graphics workstation. Same goes for SLi. Most of this is just for "braggin Rights!" IMHO. Though I can see that people with 30" Ultra high resolution displays will benefit from SLi for some games. Most software simply isn't optimized for multi-thread execution. So it's more about marketing, self-image, and status, than it is about performance.
 
vista_blista said:
Enthusiasts anticipated the worst from AMD with a blind fervor, and now they reap what was sown. Doesn't bother me a bit. AMD can't afford to squander their meager resources on such side-projects. I want AMD to focus on sensible projects for consumers like me, who won't give up on them without a fight.
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Ditto, except for the very last part... I could personally care less for AMD (or most any tech company really) but fact is the market and consumers need AMD, and right now they need a focused AMD.

Even if there's a purpose to setups like the Quad FX down the road, now is clearly not the time. Heck, I'd hope both Intel and AMD put more work into efficency (throtling cores independently, etc.) before trying to pitch such elaborate setups to enthusiasts. /shrug
 
I think there is certainly a place for platforms like 4x4 and Skulltrail, but not in any consumer level capacity. Gamers need simple, and overclockable solutions that cover a range of budget ranges. 4x4 was marketed to the gamer and the enthusiast and while the platform was interesting, it was a brute force approach to a simple problem. The heat production and power draw were unreasonable for a typical desktop setup.

It was just laughable that AMD has always bashed Intel's non-native quad core approach and yet they brought out 4x4 as a stop gap. 4x4 is anything but elegant, and now that they have their lack luster native quad core parts they can dump 4x4. This virtually acknowledges that 4x4 was a bad idea and little more than a failed marketing ploy.
 
Faction said:
overkill???

I thought this was HardOCP.. sorry must have clicked on the wrong forums.
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Well, [H] to me has always meant getting the best performance for the buck, not spending idiotic amounts of money on something you could not truly utilize...
 
I am disappointed. I do a bunch of editing and I was looking forward to upgrading to quadcores. The cost of the Quad FX was never really an issue for me as I bought it used off a clan that had won it. I guess I'll need to look at plugging in quadcore Opterons instead.
 
Manny Calavera said:
AMD I would think,has to be very careful about exactly what they spend cash on right now,and this platform is not worth throwing more bad money after.
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I can certainly appreciate that. However, I don't think that goosing ASUS for a BIOS update (or writing it for them) to allow compatibility with 4-core Opterons is going to break their bank. Rumor is that it already exists, but hasn't been released.

This way, they make good on their promises and give an upgrade path, don't spend a lot of money on actually producing chips, and we're done. Asus gets to sell whatever remaining stock of motherboards (and likely, a few thousand more) that they have to folks that want "4x8".

Seems reasonable to me.

jh
 
MartinX said:
Yeah, thing is, you're a power-user for whom this tech has a practical use, the stuff that's (apparently) been ditched was being pitched at the normal/enthusiast user market, for whom gaming is the primary, everyday, heavy-load application.

For that market and purpose the technology is effectively useless, even if it was cheaper, as pointed out earlier in the thread on a practical level even the most stressful multi-threaded games aren't taxing current quad-cores and GPUs remain the limiting factor, as has been the case for a long time now.

Another 4 CPU cores won't improve image quality or fps one jot, which is the concern of the market that they were trying to sell it to.
Click to expand...

I agree with you on all points, actually - I think that 4x4 ended up selling mainly to an audience not interesting gaming, which was not what AMD intended. For example, strangely, the 4x4 was compatible with Solaris (perhaps not that strange, given the server roots of the platform), so it made a killer ZFS based server. It makes a great Linux file server. And the memory bandwidth is great for folks that are running lots of VMs like me.

In other words, the platform sold to (please excuse the immodesty) a lot of sophisticated, and somewhat influential, users. Folks that absolutely influence other buyers. Besides the fact that I have a couple dozen AMD cpus behind me right now, I've probably helped sell another couple of hundred. AMD needs to factor that in, although they probably will not.

The bottom line is that AMD did put it out there, and did make promises. I expect them to keep those promises. Aren't they now promising, at least to some degree, some backwards and forwards compatibility with Spider? I think that breaking promises now is going to lose a lot of goodwill and direct sales from a variety of people. As Bush said: "fool me once - we don't get fooled again" ;)

I think that this is worth at least a BIOS update. I hope that someone is listening.

My $.02.

jh
 
As another one who bought Quad FX, I'll be disappointed if they don't do something to make the upgrade to 8 cores possible; Quad FX was specifically marketed as a system you could buy today and upgrade when the new processors launched. Rather than shafting us, AMD should just find a better way to make money off of us. After all, if we were willing to buy the bulky, expensive, jet-engine-on-take-off-noisy system that was Quad-FX, we had to be pretty good customers for AMD--why risk pissing us off?
 
As someone who learned the true power of smp on a dual AMD Athlon XP (yes, XP not MP, I bought them very early before the bridges got cut or something) all my desktops after that have been dual AMD based.

However after building a dual opteron 240 system, i got a laptop because finally you could get multi core laptops (although not multiple processor).

AMD needs to keep a relatively affordable dual socket (or even quad socket) platform available to those of us who can splurge every half decade or so on being able to get some mad power to last us a while. One of the fans on my dual athlon xp system just died a few weeks ago -- should tell you a bit of how long it lasted! :)

Besides, for the coherent idea of a platform existing gives an easy way for the community to understand it. You can easily search the 2cpu forums for the 760MP and 760MPX chipsets as they were common for the dual processor amd enthuaist.

I can imagine how hard it is though, these are tough times for a small company.
 
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