Before arriving at DigitalLife, I had setup meetings with several major companies. One of these companies was AMD. They wanted to meet with us to demonstrate their answer to Intel's quad core. After some handshaking and an offering of food, we got down to business.

They began by saying that their story is not one of processors, but of a platform. They don't want to only advance the processors themselves, but the very platforms they stand on. Their reasoning for this was that you can only do so much with 1P architecture. Thus, they are expanding it to 2P which creates greater opportunity for the future. AMD believes that this sort of platform will be able to last much longer than the single processor setup. So the answer to Intel's recently announced Kentfield Quad core is using two AMD X2 processors. Now I was obviously not equipped to run a side by side comparison, but their claim is that this type of quad core setup, dubbed the "4x4" platform, is actually more efficient and better equipped to handle multi-tasking.

One of their examples was a "4x4" system they had running in their meeting room. This system was encoding a movie, running two instances of City of Heroes with active parties, and running 2 Hi-Def movies. The incredible part about it was that as you switch between each of these projects, there was no hesitation or stuttering. It was quite smooth to work with. At this point I can't say for certain, but I believe the gain is actually in the fact that it uses two separate buses and each set of two cores gets a dedicated memory controller.

What makes this platform a bit more future-proof than the competition is its large amount of headroom. It wasn't until recently that software and game developers began to support multi-threaded applications so that multiple cores could be engaged simultaneously. As games become more demanding, the developers are going to design the games to engage all four cores of a quad core system to maximize the performance. The problem lies in the fact that with all four cores engaged, you have little to no headroom left. The "4x4" platform solves this issue by not being limited to a single socket. The AMD guys assured me that by mid-2007 you will be able to plug two quad core processors into this platform and create an eight core computer. Obviously, you would have quite a bit of head room left. The "4x4" architecture will eliminate the ceiling that is inherent to a 1P system. Quite impressive.

Many of you may be saying the same thing I did: "How am I going to afford two processors when I can barely afford one?" AMD has plans to offer retail packages that contain two identical processors in the box. These will be cheaper than buying them separately. However, this is where I see the weakness in their 2P platform. Asking enthusiasts to buy 2 processors is asking quite a bit.

In conclusion, AMD fans can rest assured that their company has not been sleeping on the job. They are ready and believe they have a superior weapon. Do I have faith in this platform? No, but I also wouldn't turn my back on it. Many people called technologies like SLI and CrossFire silly and unnecessary, but now we have people running quad SLI. They are looking at a November release and partnered with both Alienware and, surprisingly, NVIDIA.