In the weeks leading up to the debut of Quad FX, a lot of speculation regarding the pricing of the processors that will be used in the platform has hit the web. AMD has held true to their promise that two of the FX-7x processors will be available for well below the thousand dollar mark. Here is the official pricing of the Athlon 64 FX-7x series. As always, all prices are for shipments of 1,000 processors.

Each price above is for a pair of processors. The package will also come with a heatsink/fan combination for each CPU. At the moment, AMD will only be offering the Athlon 64 FX-7x series in pairs. In addition, all future FX processors will be designed specifically for use in the Quad FX platform. This means that single socket FX processors are destined to disappear from the market. The Athlon 64 FX-62, based on socket AM2, will therefore be the last AMD processor from the FX series meant for single socket desktop systems.

The phasing out of single socket FX solutions also signals the rise of Athlon 64 X2 CPUs as the new flagship AMD solutions for single socket AMD desktop platforms. It would not be too surprising if AMD’s next major announcement will concern new Athlon 64 X2 CPUs. The new X2s will replace the current Athlon 64 FX-6x series.

Taking a closer look at the Athlon 64 FX-7x processors, it is evident that the Athlon 64 FX-72 is very similar to the Athlon 64 FX-62. Both share the same clock frequency and also have 1 Mbyte of L2 cache per core. The main difference is in the sockets they use; the newer FX-72 being based on a 1207 pin design while the older FX-62 is based on Socket AM2. Since AMD will be selling the Athlon 64 FX-72 processors in pairs, by halving the pricing of the FX-72, we get a theoretical price for a single FX-72 processor of about $400. Place this figure against the $713 required to buy an Athlon FX-62 and it is plain to see just how competitive AMD is being with the pricing of their FX-7x processors.

The $999 MSRP for the Athlon 64 FX-74, which is the current top-of-the-range CPU for the Quad FX platform, is identical to the price of the Core 2 Extreme QX6700; currently, Intel’s only LGA 775 quad-core solution. Looking at Intel’s roadmap, their next quad-core processor, the Core 2 Quad X6600, will be released in January of 2007 (around a month away) at an official price of 851 USD. As a result of Intel’s choice of pricing, the FX-72, at least from data currently available, will be in the same price segment as the Intel Core 2 Quad X6600. The Athlon 64 FX-70 will compete with any possible quad-core processors released from Intel at a lower price around the 599 USD range. It is important to remember that although we are pretty certain the prices used above are final, since they are provided by Intel’s Roadmap, pricing is always open to change before the products are actually released.

The new 1207 pin CPU Socket is the same interface used for Opteron Revision F CPUs. Opteron Revision F CPUs made their advent into the market last August boasting support for DDR2 memory, a first for AMD server processors. Even though they do have the same number of pins as Athlon 64 FX-7x CPUs, Opteron Revision F CPUs are not compatible with Quad FX.