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Hae-Yu
08-18-2006, 10:49 AM
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060817-7535.html

Ars gives a look at the forthcoming quad-core CPUs.
Considering that Intel is aggressively pricing its quad core very low - the same price as a Core 2 Duo EE, these look to be geared toward the desktop/ workstation market.

Will Windows XP support this out of the box? It's 4 cores on 1 socket, but XP Pro only supports 2 CPUs. Server 2003 and SQL Server only support up to 4 procs. I wonder if XP or Vista will have that limit bumped up?

Next year, 8 core chips will be released and this looks to be the next area of expansion. In 5 years time, I can see us with 128 core procs. So these limits on which version supports X# cores will have to be removed. For multi-tasking fiends, this new era will be a godsend. You can have your MMORPG character logged in doing it's repetitive job, rip a DVD, and play an FPS at the same time.

Hae-Yu
08-18-2006, 10:54 AM
OK, I get it after reading some more. The limitation is licensing not architecture. XP Pro can support 2 sockets, regardless of the amount of processors on those sockets. So it can suppot 2 single/ dual/ quad core hyperthreaded CPUS.

Maull
08-18-2006, 11:09 AM
so a possible eight core setup is available to whoever can spend the doh?

Hae-Yu
08-18-2006, 12:00 PM
It looks that way

Nebula
08-18-2006, 02:22 PM
thats right.. you can have quad core with two processor slots.

on top of that, there are also dual video cards which can be set up as SLI.

IE - 4 video cards... with at total of 2GB worth of video RAM.

I love it :cool: