AMD's next big badboy platform Quad FX (formerly known as "4x4") has been officially launched today. It comprises a dual socket motherboard from NVIDIA which is based around their nForce 680a SLI chipset, and a couple of AMD's newly released FX-70 series dual-core processors. The processors will communicate together by means of Dual Socket Direct Connect (or DSDC) technology to create one very powerful quad-core powerhouse, not to mention room for quad graphics and quad hard drives etc. - One very quad happy platform indeed.

The new 90nm FX-70 processor family from AMD is made up of three variants in the FX-70, FX-72 and FX-74, these each sporting 2MB's of L2 cache and running at 2.6GHz, 2.8GHz and 3.0GHz respectively.

With the NDA having just been lifted, japanese site PC Watch have already thrown up the first set of benchmarks showing off its capabilities as they compare it to Intel's Core 2 Quad CPUs. The text is of course in japanese but the graphs speak for themselves. There's also some more info on it over at the Dailytech today.

And as you can expect, theres some other coverage surfacing by the minute so i'll keep updating the list of linkies below for ya'll over the next few hrs.

- Hot Hardware
- AMDZone
- AMDZone #2
- XBit Labs
- PC Perspective
- Hexus
- The Inquirer
- The Inquirer #2
- ExtremeTech
- DailyTech
- LegitReviews
- Anandtech
- FiringSquad
- The Inquirer #3
- EliteBastards

PC Watch has the scoop on AMD's upcoming 4x4 enthusiasts platform. The article claims AMD dubbed its 4x4 platform Quad FX. The upcoming Quad FX platform is based around NVIDIA's unannounced nForce 680a chipset with SLI compatibility. DailyTech previously revealed images of ASUS' nForce 680a offering-L1N64-SLI WS. Initial Quad FX systems will be powered by AMD dual-core processors, though the platform should be compatible with AMD's upcoming Stars processors.

AMD is expected to launch Quad FX with three processors initially-the FX-74, FX-72 and FX-70. AMD is shipping the FX-74, FX-72 and FX-70 in pairs at $999, $799 and $599 respectively. This undercuts Intel's recently released quad-core Kentsfield Core 2 Extreme QX6700 processor priced at $999.