Advanced Micro Devices Tuesday pledged to release a version of its upcoming enthusiast desktop product, code-name 4x4, for less than $1000.

Pat Moorhead, AMD's vice president of global channel marketing, said the 4x4 was essentially 2 dual-core Athlon 64-FX processors tuned for gaming on a single mother board.

This will not be limited to just the elite enthusiasts, he said, promising a two CPU bundle configured at significantly less than $1,000.

Moorhead spoke to a group of journalists in Sunnyvale, AMD's California headquarters. He also demonstrated the configuration for reporters, but declined let them view the product.

AMD first announced the 4x4 at an analyst conference in June, also mentioning that a number of already available software could take advantage of the technology. Executives from Nero, a developer of the popular Nero Burning Rom, and Luxology, maker of the 3D Modo application, their software already takes advantage of systems like the 4x4.

On top of that, he said Bioware, Crytek, Havok Irrational Games, Midway and Sony are working on software applications and games that take advantage of the multicore processing.

As far as entertainment, many games currently do not currently support such advanced hardware, but there were a number of software updates developers are working on to make their games become multi-threaded - effectively allowing run on the multi-core 4x4. The push on developers came from Intel, who has a new line of dual-core processors arriving this year, with the desktop version Conroe coming on Thursday.

Intel also has its own quad-core platform under development and is also expected to ship the product later this year. AMD officials have said the 4x4 will be released by the holiday season this year.

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