In the past few months, 'multi' solutions are the norm in pc hardware. We've had multi core cpu's, presently 4 cores (AMD phenom and Intel core2 quads and extremes) are very much mainstream. We also now have 2 graphics processors in a single card (nvidia had one last year, now ati has come out with the hd3870x2).
Recently, Intel thought they would create a stir just for fun, so they ripped off some tech from their server motherboard lineup and put together a desktop motherboard which they siad was for the 'gaming enthusiast'.
So what is it all about? it puts two cpus on the same board, has 4 PCIe x16 slots and Fully buffered(FB) DIMM. Whats more, its the first non-NVIDIA chipset motherboard to offer SLI support. The motherboard is obviously larger than your standard enthusiast motherboard and is built to the eATX (extended ATX) specifications common in the server and workstation markets. It aslo has 6 SATA ports and one IDE slot.
Note that the RAM u need to run is not the usual, but Fully Buffered DDR2. This is optimized for stability rather than speed (as required in workstations/servers) and hence the RAM will work with lesser performance.
So, you pop in 2 Xeon quad cores and it will give twice the performance of one Quad, right? well, not really. As you might already know, games today are not even using four cores completely, so in real life gaming benchmarks, the performance shows absolutely no improvement.
So, this is just something for the furure. This means, as of now, it will just do the rounds at harware review sites and remain there.
AMD was actually the first to bring out such a platform, the AMD QuadFX. AMD hoped to use it to counter the core2 quads, but alas. the board was too hot, consumed power like anything, and was damn expensive. Whats more, it did not give as much performance as many cheaper Intel solutions. So is this another AMD quadfx? i think so..
