AMD has announced that the company is not currently taking into account development of a dual-processor platform. With this statement, AMD takes its hands off the so-much promoted FASN8 platform and retreats from the competition with Intel on the dual-processor market.

"AMD has discontinued future planning and development of its eight-core enthusiast platform at this time. […] We will continue to support customers that have an existing Quad FX with DSDC and are also working on an upgrade path for those customers. The upgrade path likely won't be a Phenom-branded product," said AMD spokeswoman, Suzy Pruitt.

In the battle for extreme performance, Intel have raised the stake with their Core 2 Duo and with the Intel Core 2 Quad microprocessors. Of course, AMD could only dodge and attack, so they raised the stake and introduced their Quad FX platform last year; the platform featured two dual-core AMD Athlon 64 FX-70-series processors - a pretty high-end alternative to Intel Core 2 Quad. The promises were that AMD's quad-core powerhorses were to be fully compatible with the Quad FX platform and would allegedly allow users to swap processors at no platform-switching cost.

Of course, Intel had to show who "the man" was and, shortly after the Quad FX episode, they started teasing each other with their own V8 platform, that promised two quad-core central processing units. As if that was not enough for the enthusiasts, Intel dug even deeper and pulled out to surface the Skulltrail platform, which would only work with two specially designed quad-core processors that jump the $3000 barrier each. A pretty salty price, but it'll be worth it, if you are obsessed with your system.

Time is running low for AMD, who failed in delivering hi-speed Phenoms to join the battle against Intel's Core 2 Extreme line. Phenom FX has also been delayed and AMD has left a single quad-core pawn on the table that can't carry more than 2.3 GHz - just enough to eat Intel's Core 2 Extreme processors dust.