Wow.. how did I totally miss this? I guess I really haven’t been following the processor business all that closely over the last few months. I knew AMD was going to launch their quad core-ish processors but I didn’t realize it would be today.. and hence.. all the major tech sites have reviews of the new AMD Quad FX platform. Is this the answer AMD fans have been waiting for in response to Intel’s rise from the near dead??

Before showing the review verdicts, I thought I’d brief you guys on what’s new about the Quad FX platform. The platform was known as the 4×4 and it’s not really a true quad core processor system. The Quad FX platform actually pairs two dual core processors into one system so you’ll need to purchase these processors in pairs. In fact, you can’t purchase them separately which is, as ExtremeTech calls it, a big irony. The Quad FX can  be purchased for roughly $999 for the pair which means each dual core processor is roughly 500 dollars. A comparable dual core Athlon64 X2 processor will run you 700 dollars. Errrr..

Finally – to support the new Quad FX platform is the NVIDIA 680a chipset.. which as you know is a competitor of ATI .. which as you know was purchased by AMD. Go figure.

OK.. now onto the reviews and their verdicts:

From ExtremeTech:

Users who really, really need several terabytes of disk and four or more displays may find a good solution here. Most of the rest of us will look elsewhere.

From Anandtech:

Prepare to revisit this discussion in less than a year’s time, and next time AMD will hopefully be much better prepared, armed with a new architecture and a cooler, smaller 65nm process. Until then, there’s always Quad FX but you’re better off with Kentsfield.

From X-Bit Labs:

First of all, the performance of a dual-processor platform built with two dual-core Athlon FX processors turned out lower than that of the competitor’s solutions built on quad-core Kentsfield CPUs. We have seen this in all test applications throughout the entire session.

From LegitReviews:

Quad FX has arrived and closes the performance gap between AMD and Intel, but ultimately it’s nothing more than a stop gap till AMD K8L processors can arrive.

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