Early adopters pay the price
When we first unveiled and benchmarked AMD's Quad FX platform in November 2006 and then pushed it to its limit in January 2007, we came to the conclusion that "the FX-70s are shaping up to be an AMD era which perhaps we'd all rather forget".
Within a year, it now seems that AMD themselves would agree. When asked about the future of the Quad FX platform by TechReport.com, AMD's Suzy Pruitt stated:
"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."
The word discontinued will be ringing in the ears of early adopters. Suzy Pruitt did add however that AMD "will continue to support customers that have an existing Quad FX with DSDC and are also working on an upgrade path for those customers". When asked for further details on the upgrade path however, she advised the upgrade "likely won't be a Phenom-branded product".
Though insistent on continuing to support the Quad FX platform, AMD seems to have promised a platform of the future and then all but forgotten it in the same year.
Further reading
HEXUS.net: AMD's '4x4' Quad-FX platform unveiled and benchmarked
HEXUS.net: AMD QuadFX pushed to the limit... and beyond
Source: TechReport.com
