MIG-31

Here at CeBIT 2005, you see innovation galore, but at the ECS stand they have something truly special that stands out as being one of the hottest products of the show. HEXUS brings you the ECS PF88, the first mainboard to support both Intel P4 AND AMD Athlon 64 processors.
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Read More: Hexus

Thanks to OpusP.Gladiator for the submit.

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The_Neon_Cowboy

"it's so new, it has no name, not even a codename at the time of writing. "

ROFL its printed on th boards in the pictures "PF88 Rev A"

Also it seems they stole the idea from ASUS subsidary ASROCK's use of "upgrade cards" to update boards upgrade models (kt880 upgrade, 1869 ali upgrade) useing 462 or 754 sockets, to socket 754 and 939... So yes it's new to have board that supports either brand cpu's but the idea they based it on isn't

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Judas

actually the "cpu upgrade" board or modules are quite old.....

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OpusP.Gladiator

aww gee ... TY MIG-31... just tryin to do my bit...muhahaha

huh.. Judas... u sure about that.... I mean from different cores with diff northbridges...?

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davidnsibs

this is cool, but wtf is the point?

edit: since both sockets will have similar life spans and the next big upgrade youll want a new mobo anyway

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craig5320

Well from a manufacturers point of view it doubles your market.

Future proofing, it means you're not limited to a brand.

I think it'd also be nice for when reviewing hardware, intel cpu and amd cpu same board and setup jus changing the cpu would have a much better comparison imho.

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davidnsibs

yes, but surely people tend to stick to the same brand of cpu, choice mainly from games (amd) or encoding stuff (intel), or on personal allegience, and the amd socket is connected through pci express to the mainboard and through another pci express slot to the graphics card, or to the sata headers etc surely that would impact performance somewhat

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Goodbye 9500pro, you've been a faithful servant through Half life, Deus Ex, Unreal 2, Max Payne 1+2, Nolf 1+2, CoD, Far Cry, Civ IV, F.E.A.R and many more

IvanV

Well, although it doesn't get closer than this, they still have different nortbridges. Also I'm not sure if a throughput of a PCI-E slot is always sufficient for a CPU. (What CPU was that anyway?! I didn't know that there was a Sempron 2200 for Socket939.) Though, obviously, it doesn't influence 3DMark performance.
And no, it's not something completely new: years ago, I saw a PCI card with four 486s.
Still, extremely interesting news.

WaltC

From the same viewpoint it may well also double your costs...

Socket changes anyone...bios support for newer cpus, increases in system bus performances--then there's HyperTransport to consider...etc. Nothing is futureproof (to me that's just a marketing term used by consumers generally to talk themselves into buying something they suspect is something they don't really need at the moment.) If there were indeed actually any "futureproof" products available then the market segment covered by such a product would no longer exist since presumably at some point everyone would have "futureproofed" himself by buying it...

A further big flaw for me is the SiS core-logic chipsets used. Most of the time SiS is a value proposition and well behind in SOA feature implementation and support. Thus neither cpu used with this mboard is likely to run as well as it would in a dedicated SOA motherboard. (I cannot consider running 3dMk to the exclusion of anything else to be any kind "review" or "test" of the product.)

Last, it's really not "a motherboard," is it (?), since you need a huge daughter card inserted into "the motherboard" to get some functionality related to the other brand of cpu. If nothing else this would make shopping for a case an interesting proposition, and it doesn't appear that Hexus even bothered thinking about a case for it...

Even if you buy this mboard, since you cannot use both cpus at once, you still have to choose your cpu--and so what really is the point here?... Regardless of which cpu you'd choose the mboard will cost more and I'll bet run appreciably slower than a dedicated mboard for your cpu with a higher-performance core-logic chipset and feature set. It looks to me like a "jack of all trades, master of none" type of situation which I can't imagine would appeal to very many folks.

No_Style

I give ECS kudos for creativity.

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Vampyromaniac

They're half way to fulfilling my request

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The_Neon_Cowboy

we want to see an intel EE 64 and AMD 64 and the same board and use both LOL or choice per application

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