After suffering months of beatings in the market at the hands of chief competitor Intel, AMD finally has the processor line that it hopes will get it back into the black and back into the hearts and minds of computer users across the world: the Phenom. The new chip, which will replace most of AMD's older Athlon offerings, will come in quad- and dual-core versions roughly consistent with AMD's current processor offerings and will feature what AMD calls "[the i]ndustry's only true x86 quad-core architecture," where all four processor cores will coordinate via electronics on the CPU die instead of through connections in the rest of the motherboard, eliminating a bottleneck inherent in Intel's quad-core design. The new Phenoms will start shipping in the second half of this year.

Two points of interest about this announcement: first, the architecture change that theoretically makes these processors superior to anything Intel's introduced to the consumer market is a nice touch - even though it's quite likely that no one will develop software in the consumer market that will come close to testing the capabilities of either quad-core solution for a while - and the renewed competition this claim implies is excellent for anyone looking for a powerful, low-cost processor. Second, AMD's press release also mentions the FASN8 platform, an all-AMD PC enthusiast platform that aims to put AMD and AMD-subsidiary ATI products on the same level as the Intel-powered NVIDIA SLI gaming systems currently astride the PC gaming market like a Colossus. Again, competition is good: the PC gaming market needs the boost to help regain parity with the console market and creating a situation that will inevitably lead to more products and lower prices is great for consumers.

Via ComputerWorld