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AMD's upcoming 4x4 gaming platform will cost "substantially" under $1,000 - for the processors at least. So said company VP Pat Moorhead, who showed off a prototype system in the US yesterday, though details of the system were kept under wraps.

AMD announced 4x4 last month. It's essentially a two-CPU motherboard rigged for ATI's CrossFire and Nvidia's SLI dual-GPU technology twice over to support four GPUs. Each CPU slot will hold a dual-core Athlon 64 FX processor, so that's four cores. Each chip gets 2GB of dedicated memory, for a total of 4GB. '4x4' is a codename, AMD insists.

The processor company has said it will push the 4x4 platform this coming Christmas. Moorhead said the platform would not be "limited" to hardcore gamers - presumably AMD will promote it to professional content creators too.

Indeed, there's nothing here that no quad-core system will be able to deliver - or, since AMD said this will be possible in due course - and octo-core rig either. AMD's quad-core CPUs will slot into a 4x4 board in place of the two dualies. The big benefit AMD stressed was the system's dual memory buses, one per processor, so there's no logjam at the memory controller as there might be with another chip maker's architecture.

AMD pitched the system as a way to run multiple, processor-hungry apps without degrading the performance of any one of them. ®

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