14 DAY TRIAL // Whenever I think at AMD's 4X4 platform, I get really nervous. I simply can't understand how they have the guts to introduce something "server like" into the desktop market and call it competitive against INTEL's new Kentsfield alternative. Maybe a comparison with the Mac Pro would be wise but only if AMD can produce a single chip quad core until the moment when 4X4 architecture will be officially launched.
The board itself is pretty huge, being built under eATX's standard. That's actually no surprise since it features 2 interconnected 680 northbridges, renamed from 590i to 680a. There are 4 memory banks, 2 for each CPU, 12 SATA II ports and 10 (out of a maximum 20) USB 2.0 ports. The 1207 pin CPU sockets are mounted far away from one another in order to keep the heat away from the CPUs.
The motherboard also spots 4 Gigabit network connectors and 4 PCI-E slots, 2 being capable of 16X and the other 2 of only 8x. Another 1x PCI-E and even an old-school PCI are available. The motherboard's name, according to Asus, is "LN64-SLI Deluxe" and it will probably live up to the "Deluxe" part. An interesting thing about the sockets is that Nvidia renamed the 1207 LGA into "L1FX" sockets.
The board is said to become available at the same time with the launch of FX-74 CPU. Pricing is still unknown, as for the performance factor, AMD says that it will successfully fight INTEL's Core architecture when running multitasking scenarios. Maybe the huge bandwidth that such a system has will prove that they are correct. But I still have to see that in order to believe it.