AMD's Quad FX platform is dead
AMD has pretty much put the final nail in the coffin of the two-socket quad-core platform.
"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."
It looks like things just didn't work out. There just weren't enough people willing to pay the high price for a platform that delivered, at best, dubious benefits. It just didn't make sense to
But what about existing Quad FX customers?
"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."
I'm not sure how to take the promise that AMD will continue to support the Quad FX platform since it's only a few months ago that AMD was promoting AMD as the future.
About the only good news for people who trusted AMD and went down the Quad FX dead end is that the Opteron 2200 series CPUs do seem to work in Quad FX motherboards.
I never really was all that enthusiastic about Quad FX, because it was priced way too high and the power requirements were insane. Here's what I wrote back in December last year:
But … don't get too excited though. The motherboard sounds great but the performance from the CPU seems lackluster at best. The reviews have started to hit the web and it seems that if you want power, the CPU to go for is the Intel QX6700 2.66 GHz quad core which manages to beat two FX-74 3.0 GHz processors running flat out. The FX-74 also has little or no scope for overclocking either. Add to that high platform costs and the need for a 750W or bigger PSU, it seems that AMD are going to have a hard time convincing hardcore enthusiasts to part with their money - if you're buying with your head, Intel wins, if you're buying with your heart, you might buy AMD. AMD is certainly going to need to work the marketing magic on this one. My ZDNet blogging colleague George Ou has much more to say about this in his latest post - "AMD Quad FX slaughtered by a single Intel CPU".
Also, it didn't help that in benchmarks two FX-74 3.0 GHz processors were slaughtered by a single Intel QX6700 2.66 GHz quad core processor.
Still, I didn't expect AMD to pull the plug on the platform so soon.
Thoughts?