“QuadFather”: up until a few weeks ago this is the informal name AMD has used to refer to their new dual-Athlon 64 FX platform. The name, coined off of Francis Ford Coppola’s famous film “The Godfather”, is meant to signify the power and respect associated with AMD’s new desktop platform. The “Quad” stands for the four Athlon FX cores that are the main attraction of the platform. Although we like the name “QuadFather” just as much, the platform is officially known as “Quad FX”.

Armed with two 1207 pin sockets and a total of four cores, the Quad FX platform supports up to 12 SATA-II hard disks and 4 PCI Express 16X electrical slots; remarkable numbers for a desktop platform. Quad FX is unique primarily because it blends workstation features with desktop priced components. It allows the creation of a personal workstation without the need to buy workstation motherboards, processors, or memory.

Quad FX is aimed towards a smaller sector of the market compared to many other AMD platforms. AMD has said on many occasions that Quad FX is enthusiast-oriented and inspired; however, this does not necessarily mean that the platform is limited to enthusiasts only. The chief feature of the platform, the support for four cores, implies that Quad FX is meant for customers who use mutli-threaded applications that benefit from multiple cores. Programs that take advantage of multiple cores range from 3D games to professional rendering applications. The decision of whether 4 cores are actually needed greatly depends on the applications that will be run on the system on a daily basis.

Every program might not greatly benefit from multiple cores, but system performance still improves as a whole. More cores increases efficiency and allow multiple background processes to be run at the same time. In addition, more applications, particularly demanding ones, can be executed parallel to each other.

A shy Quad FX, at that time mostly known to us as 4x4, was first formally introduced to members of the press during AMD’s Analyst Day in June of 2006. Small hints of information regarding their next generation architecture, internally known as K10 but more widely recognized as K8L, were also released at that time. Although the release date hasn’t been written in stone, new processors based on the K10 are expected to ship in the second half of 2007.

Quad FX is not a temporary platform from AMD. Currently, a widespread misconception is that Quad FX is just an attempt from AMD in order to keep up to pace with Intel’s quad-core processors. However, this does not actually turn out to be the case. Quad FX has been tailored specifically for extremely high performance systems and is expected to be updated when the K10 architecture is released. A key feature of Quad FX is that it allows for seamless upgrading. AMD seems to be pretty confident in 4x4’s ability to upgrade CPUs as they have already brought up the possibility of an octal core system. We will discuss more regarding this subject further into the article.