14 DAY TRIAL // Or that's what AMD claims anyway. And judging by the (un)happy experience we've all had with the Quad Father (or the 4x4 architecture as it was widely known), one could see this also as an unfortunate event. However, things have changed a lot since the power-hungry socket 1207 CPUs were introduced onto the market. And AMD has a newer (and a lot more powerful) CPU that can produce comparable results with the Core 2 Quad architecture.
Dubbed the FASN8 (first AMD silicon next-gen 8-core) this new architecture is based on the usage of two Phenom FX CPUs which will each feature four cores running on a single die. Due to the single die, the Phenom FX is currently the only "native" 4-core CPU (the Core 2 Quad design is based on two dies which communicate using a crossbar interface).
The new platform will be based on the upcoming AMD's 790 core-logic and that says a lot about the graphics design of the new FASN8 platform. Aside from the dual socket support, the board also features HyperTransport 3.0 and at least 32 PCI Express 2.0 lanes. And that opens up a new doorway for graphics since 32 lanes are more than enough for Crossfire support. Actually AMD/ Ati calls the new CrossFire version 2.0 "Quad Crossfire" and there's a good reason for that since 32 lanes of PCIe 2.0 goodness are enough to run 4 Ati/AMD video cards. That doesn't mean that the Quad Crossfire will work just like Quad SLI. According to various sources, AMD may choose 4 ATI Radeon HD 2000 cards for CrossFire 2.0 but only three GPUs will be used for graphics rendering while the fourth GPU will render physics effects.
This type of reasoning could be great if it ever came in an usable form but that's highly unlikely at this moment. And there are a couple of good reasons that can answer the "why" part. First, the development of asymmetric GPU processing is never easy (considering the driver part). Nvidia's own Quad GPU solutions were pretty unstable and only a bunch of games performed better due to their native support. On the other hand, currently there are no games that support PP on Ati (or Nvidia for that matter since G8x supports physics processing too) cards. And that may render Ati's PP support useless in the future. For the moment, it's a "wait and see" game. According to AMD, the first FASN8 platforms are due to come out in the fall so you probably won't die of old age before that happens.