Tech - AMD 4x4 Sockets - The Answer to the Cell Processor

I've been reading up on processor architectures today and it has me thinking about the new 4x4 socket motherboards. Essentially these are duel processor motherboards. For games, which is the majority of it's market and gaurantees it to sell, it will be used to support 4 cores and 4 graphics cards. Hence the design name 4x4.

But I remember in articles AMD citing the possibility of coprocessors such as a physics processors and while nothing prevents third parties from producing such chips I don't really see a large number of possible vendors. But I would bet that AMD itself is going to release a coprossor. And I'm suggesting that that coprocessor is a specific responce to the cell processor. I remember in an article them mentioning the socket as a new vehicle before possibly integrating such functionality directly into it's CPU packages. A coprocessor with a bunch of vector processing units would be a perfect proof of concept as well as giving developers a means to use the technology without AMD commiting an unproven and unused architecture and instruction set into their expensive processor packages.

Vector processing units are called that for lack of a better name because that is their most obvious use, but not their only. They are complete RISC processors in all respects except they are not autonimous and are designed to be controlled by another processor. There are highly optimized though for specific computational operations. For example the cell processor with eight VPU's gives phynominal single precission floating point operations but only only (!) 3 times the preformance with double procission as compared to the main CPU.