What the FX?

The quad-core choice is widening still further, reports Jack Hammer

The drive to ‘do it on all fours’ gained even further pace today as little-known Polish processor company MAD announced its imminent quad-core plans. According to MAD, the company’s new Quid FX platform will shoehorn a quartet of 386SX chips onto a single motherboard, for a ‘huge performance boost’.

‘The 386SX may not be a particularly fast processor on its own by today’s standards,’ explained MAD’s Technical Director Captain Hook. ‘But put four of them together and they’re four times not particularly fast – which is faster!’

The Quid FX platform uses dual-independent 16-bit ISA buses to communicate between each processor, capable of a whopping 8Mbytes/sec in both directions. These will be special Incoherent ISA connections, which stop each 386SX processor from being able to understand what the others are doing, so they don’t get sidetracked.

According to MAD, the platform will come into its own when running multiple copies of Reversi at the same time, or Reversi and Minesweeper simultaneously. MAD also expects FreeCell to execute considerably faster on Quid FX than a single 386, and it may even be possible to play very loud audio clips alongside the game. MAD is calling this ‘megaphone tasking’.

MAD told us Quid FX stands for Quid Facit X? (Latin for ‘what the X are they doing?’). ‘It’s really a platform for the future’, Captain Hook explained. ‘By using four sockets we have much greater upgrade flexibility. When we move to native 486SX in 2007 we will really give Intel and AMD something to think about!’