AMD recently unveiled a supercharged, small form factor PC at E3 this week, a futuristic-looking gaming rig that promises to easily deliver the 90 FPS required by VR headsets like the new Oculus Rift. They’re calling it ‘Project Quantum’, and is said could come to market “in the not-too-distant future.”
Revealed by AMD’s Marketing Director, Chris Hook, at the company’s “New Era of PC Gaming” presentation earlier this week, Project Quantum not only signifies a push by AMD to get PC gaming out of the office and into the living room, but is a showcase for their most leading edge technology.
“I challenged AMD’s engineering team. I said, ‘Look, give me all the performance that you get in a desktop tower PC, but put it in something small and compact and beautiful—something I can put in my living room … something that when I get those Oculus headsets that we’re delivering 90 FPS..'” – Chris Hook
Hook calls the near console-size computer “whisper quiet,” a direct result of the rig’s water-cooling system that resides in the bottom half of the device. A singular fan in the top half of Quantum cools the heated water as it’s drawn across a radiator, allowing for the heat to dissipate well away from the unnamed dual Fiji GPUs (4GB of HBM RAM), and an Intel Core i7-4790K which is likely just a placeholder until AMD’s Zen CPUs are released next year.
Its off-board power supply, a cumbersome-looking brick that may have to be hidden away if you want to keep up the device’s ‘Borg cube’ sci-fi vibe, reduces the system’s heat load even further. The prototype’s body is made of magnesium and black-painted aluminum, and is decorated with red LED’s to complete AMD’s vision of a 4K-playing, living room VR PC from the future.
Devon Nekechuk and Victor Camardo of AMD spoke with PCWorld’s Gordon Mah Ung, telling him “Project Quantum is mostly a proof-of-concept from AMD.” Saying that Fiji’s use of HBM memory, stacked close to the GPU itself, means very tiny graphics cards can be built.”
AMD says they’ll be joining up with their “most elite partners” to bring Quantum to market in the not-too-distant future.