AMD has officially announced that the name of its coming series of processors for the desktop market will be AMD Phenom. The Phenom name will first appear with the launch of the Barcelona architecture, expected at the end of the year, and replace the current Athlon series. Just like today, AMD will launch several different processor series of the Phenom family where the enthusiast models will be called Phenom FX; the regular quad-core processors will be called Phenom X4, while the dual-core equivalents will be called Phenom X2.
“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.”
Except from the support for both Socket AM2 and Socket AM2+ the Phenom FX processors can be used in dual processor systems in the shape of AMD’s new enthusiast platform. AMD has namely also revealed the FASN8 as the first complete AMD enthusiast platform. Except from the Phenom FX processors it will use the AMD Radeon HD2000 graphics card family and AMD’s own chipsets. This octo-core platform will replace today’s Quad FX platform.
