AMD lifts Phenom pen

AS WELL as being the day that the Radeon HD 2900 hits the market, today is also the day that DAAMIT christens its upcoming Barcelona chip as Phenom.

Yes, whilst we have lived for many years with the Athlon and the Athlon X2, new X4 processors will be dubbed Phenom. At least, on the desktop side - no change to Opteron branding is expected.

Standard Barcelona quad-cores will be the Phenom X4, whilst the high-end gamer product will be the Phenom FX. DAAMIT has decreed that the next-gen QuadFX platform will be dubbed the FASN8 (that's fascinate, peeps) and will feature Radeon HD in Crossfire, a couple of Phenom FX chips and the upcoming RD790 chipset. HardOCP called the first iteration of QuadFX an 'abortion' of a product, and so we will eagerly await the next-gen version. Can it deliver?

Meanwhile, we're currently thinking of good nicknames for the new processors. One INQ reader pointed out that Phenom was a bit too close for comfort, so to speak, to Femidom, brand name for female prophylactics. Someone else pointed out that it's a bit like pheromone, leading us to wonder if DAAMIT is intending Phenom to be a safety net that stops the worst from happening or a product that invokes the scent of success. Since Phenom chips won't be on the market until Christmas, we'll have a while to wait to find out.

In another startling use of a press release, the firm also said it will release an eight core CPU system which it has decided to call FASN8. It wants us to warp the language and pronounce these five characters the same way we'd say fascinate.

This FASN8 system will have two "true" quad core "Phenoms" and use a freshly designed chipset which it hasn't named publicly yet.

The use of the word "true" is designed to throw sand in the face of its puny competitor Chipzilla, which also claims it has a "true" quad core CPU. AMD claims that cores talking to each other on the same die beat Intel because its chips use a front side bus external to the processor.

Much of the details of AMD's Mr Phenom have been widely leaked, but only professional spinners could put the following gloss on the "brain" of a computer.

"AMD Phenom processors will be uniquely designed to facilitate intelligent uses of energy and system resources that are reliable, virtualisation ready and energy efficient, driving optimum performance per watt."

Got it? µ