Delivering a foreshadow of innovations to come, AMD has unveiled the upcoming AMD Phenom processor family name and publicly demonstrated the first all-AMD enthusiast platform.

What AMD calls 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 graphics card for desktop and mobile computers. The processors and graphics card are shipping now, and AMD expects quad-core and dual-core AMD Phenom-based desktop systems to ship in the second half of 2007.

In a demonstration in San Francisco, AMD previewed an eight-core platform, code named "FASN8," (pronounced fascinate) to show the first AMD silicon-based next-generation eight-core platform. The demonstration platform includes two quad-core AMD Phenom processors, its new DirectX 10 ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT graphics card, as well as an upcoming AMD next-generation, high-performance chipset, due in the second half of 2007.

"AMD has always enjoyed a great bond with the enthusiast community, and the introduction of the AMD Phenom processor family will take our relationship to new heights," said Bob Brewer, corporate vice president and general manager of AMD's desktop division. "We continue to focus on listening to and addressing users' evolving needs. AMD is confident the performance enhancements enabled by true quad-core client technology in computing-intensive environments will allow them to realize new possibilities and find new inspiration."

AMD Phenom processors will be uniquely designed to facilitate intelligent uses of energy and system resources that are reliable, virtualization-ready, and energy efficient, driving optimum performance-per-watt. All AMD Phenom processors 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 processorùa bottleneck inherent in other products that are packaging two dual-core chips to form quad-core processors, the company says. 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, the company says. 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."

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