Some PC aficionados may remember back in 2015, AMD gave the world a glimpse of Project Quantum, an ITX desktop PC with a radical design. Then, without any warning, AMD went silent and all information and news about the mini desktop went silent. That is, until recently.
A Twitter user by the name Pete2097 (@Pete_2097) had apparently discovered the company’s some design patents – filed by AMD earlier in February but granted last month – for a machine that looks exactly like the company’s Project Quantum mini desktop PC.
For the uninitiated, Project Quantum was an exercise in design and practicality, done in part by AMD with two objectives: to show that it could think outside the box when designing desktop systems, while also managing to fit not one, but two Radeon R9 Fiji GPUs into the machine. Unfortunately, however, Ryzen wouldn’t appear for another couple of years, so AMD was forced to use the Intel’s Devil’s Canyon Core i7-4790K CPU and a Z97 ITX motherboard in the machine’s design.
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Ultimately, the main concept of Project Quantum was to house all the components in the lower half of the machine – all water-cooled, by the way – while the upper chamber was where the heat of the machine was transferred to and dissipated.
The patent papers can be found at FreePatentsOnline, but be warned; there isn’t a whole lot of detail about the machine, but if we’re honest, it looks like AMD has changed nothing of its design. In fact, the only thing different is the removal of the “Radeon R9” badge that used to sit bottom left on the machine’s front.
To be clear, there’s no indication that AMD is planning on resurrecting the five-year old mini rig, but if it does so, it’s likely that the brand will update the guts of Project Quantum with more up-to-date hardware. Such as, say, its recently announced Zen3-based Ryzen 5000 series CPU and Big Navi GPU, the latter set to be announced next week on 28 October.
(Source: Twitter, HotHardware, Hexus, FPO)
