Quad FX Gets The Boot

From the We Hardly Knew Ye (And We Liked It That Way) Department: The last hurrah for enthusiast multiprocessor systems has hurrahed its last. Power-hungry, hot-running, expensive, and limited by poor memory bandwidth, AMD’s Quad FX is finally being taken behind the woodshed. According to DailyTech, AMD has “discontinued future planning and development” for Quad FX, which means – in short – that the platform has been canned.

So what does this mean for multiprocessor enthusiast systems? The simple fact remains that multiprocessor systems require more power, generate more heat, and cost significantly more than their single-CPU counterparts, and they only appeal to a tiny fraction of enthusiasts, which represent only a fraction of the wider PC market. Though Intel’s offerings are the flavor of the month (or year), there’s reason to expect that Intel’s Skulltrail won’t go far either. Oh, sure, we’ll see a few offerings for the sake of establishing Intel’s fire superiority in the gaming market – but don’t expect much market penetration…at all. Enthusiasts would rather hold out for octal-core CPUs, which will likely cost less. We suspect that with the end of Quad FX, multi-CPU gaming platforms have been effectively kicked to the curb once and for all.

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.

Source: DailyTech