AMD today unveiled the upcoming four-core AMD Phenom processor family name and publicly demonstrated the first all-AMD enthusiast platform, codenamed “FASN8.”
“The industry’s only true quad-core client processors are expected to deliver the ultimate visual experience, especially when paired with AMD’s new DirectX 10 ATI Radeon HD 2000 series. AMD expects true quad-core and dual-core AMD Phenom-based desktop systems will ship in the second half of 2007,” the chip maker announced today.
AMD Phenom processors will be virtualization-ready and energy efficient and will feature resources like an integrated DDR2 memory controller, HyperTransport technology links, and 128-bit Floating Point Units, for improved speed and performance in floating point calculations.
“With the true quad-core design offered by the upcoming AMD Phenom processors, cores communicate on the die rather than through a front side bus external to the processor – a bottleneck inherent in other products that are packaging two dual-core chips to form quad-core processors. Additionally, AMD’s Direct Connect Architecture on-chip ensures that all four cores have optimum access to the integrated memory controller and integrated HyperTransport links, so that performance scales well with the number of cores. This design is also highlighted by a unique shared L3 cache for quicker data access and Socket AM2 and Socket AM2+ infrastructure compatibility to enable a seamless upgrade path.
“AMD’s quad-core processor rollout will put more computing horsepower at PC users’ fingertips,” observed Nathan Brookwood, research fellow at Insight 64. “Quad-core innovations come at a time when many users are finding that the combination of Microsoft Vista™, multi-threaded applications and DirectX 10 no longer delivers the crisp performance they experienced on last year’s fastest systems running last year’s software. The AMD Phenom processor’s ability to deliver significantly more performance within the same power and thermal envelopes as its dual-core antecedents should make this quad-core processor a fitting follow-on to earlier AMD dual-core processor offerings,” the Company explains.
