Submitted by: kirkland on Thursday November 30th, 2006 at 06:04 PM EST

Advanced Micro Devices today launched a motherboard with four cores, targeting gaming enthusiasts in an effort to keep pace with the release of quad-core chips by rival Intel.

AMD's Quad FX Platform includes two dual-core Athlon 64 FX-70 series chips and uses Nvidia's 680a chip set. AMD's choice of components shows it is willing to follow open standards even though the company acquired Nvidia's rival ATI Technologies earlier this month, said Ian McNaughton, product manager for Athlon 64 FX products.

AMD will sell the Quad FX Platform with three types of chips built with a 90-nanometer process, charging $599 for a pair of 2.6 GHz FX-70 chips, $799 for a pair of 2.8 GHz FX-72 chips, and $999 for a pair of 3.0 GHz FX-74 chips, if purchased in lots of 1,000 units.

PC vendors who use the Quad FX will attract more than just hard-core gamers, McNaughton said. A desktop with four computing cores can be a workstation for "megataskers," those users who watch high-definition video while burning a DVD, downloading a BitTorrent file, and chatting on a TeamSpeak connection, even as their PC runs antivirus software, Skype, and instant messaging applications in the background.

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