AMD kills off 4x4 Quad FX

AMD excited many technology enthusiasts last year when it introduced
the Quad FX platform. AMD representatives touted this platform as the
next big thing from AMD.

AMD apparently talked up its Quad FX enthusiast platform so well that
Intel decided to roll out a competing product in its unreleased
Skulltrail platform. When the Quad FX platform first hit market in
January of 2007 it seemed doomed from the start to many with steep
price premiums for the mainboards and the processors. These price
premiums led to the lethargic adoption of the platform.

According to The Tech Report AMD representative Suzy Pruitt commented
on the future of Quad FX. “The short answer is that while there are
still engineering resources focused on future platform offerings that
build off Quad FX, the current energy and effort has gone into
programs and product initiatives like Spider and AMD has discontinued
future planning and development of its eight-core enthusiast platform
at this time.”

Pruitt continued, “We will continue to support customers that have an
existing Quad FX with DSDC and are also working on an upgrade path for
those customers. While AMD is not actively promoting AMD Opteron
processor as a 2P enthusiast solution, we recognized that there are
enthusiasts who are looking for two-socket solutions and think an
Opteron platform is well-suited to meet that demand at this time.”

After all the promises ad statements by AMD that Quad FX was the
companies enthusiast future, AMD has apparently decided to all but
kill the platform off. The few enthusiasts who plunked down the big
dollars required to adopt the platform should be feeling a bit
uncomfortable right now.

AMD promises to continue support for the platform. However, AMD also
promised the platform was the future and the company has all but
killed it off the same year. The best Quad FX owners can look forward
to is an upgrade to Opteron processors that work with the Quad FX
mainboards.

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=9838