Now it’s official: Phenom™ will be AMD’s top brand
AMD’s new “Stars” processor family will be branded Phenom™, because, as AMD’s press release sais:
Industry’s only true x86 quad-core architecture paired with the ATI Radeon™ HD 2000 series to offer a phenomenal computing experience
AMD sais that the new AMD Phenom™ will be the industry’s first true, native quad-core processor. Anyway, Intel’s Core 2 Quad is not: it has two Core 2 Duo processors on the same PCB.
AMD sais:
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. 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 officials say that Phenom™ Quad-core will be available in the 2007 Christmas season.
Only 224 days till X-mas! Let’s wait and see!