AMD recently spoke up about its new 4×4 platform in its headquarters in Silicon Valley and the news were pleasant for those longing for AMD’s coming super-enthusiast platform. When AMD presented its 4×4 platform it focused on that you as a consumer will be able to pair 4 processor cores with 4 graphics cores for optimal system performance. When AMD now discussed the new platform it was not as eager to mention the four graphics circuits, which might have to do with AMD’s quisition of ATI which yet does not have a Quad-GPU solution on the market. Instead it wanted to foicus on another code-name for the platform, Quadfather.
Quadfather, or 4×4, has its main attraction with the support for two dual-core processors, which tends for some extreme multitasking performance with four processor cores. Where a quad-core processor has one memory channel this platform will have dedicated channels for each processor, I.e. twice the bandwidth in theory, compared to a single-slot Athlon 64 system.
That this sounds like a very expensive platform was something we pondered over when AMD first presented Quadfather and to begin with it seemed that only the FX series would be used with this platform, which would mean that only the processors would’ve costed at least $1,600. Now AMD announced that it will have several different processor models available for the Quadfather plattform and several of them will cost way below $1,000.
This feels like a must to be able to fight Intel and its Core architecture, which will arrive as Quad-core as early as the fourth quarter. We’re really looking forward to seeing more of AMD’s new enthusiast platform as its potential seems to be something out of the ordinary.
