Wednesday, September 12, 2007

AMD Readies the Quad-Core Phenom

AMD's Phenom -- a quad-core desktop chip designed for gamers, content creators, and others running multimedia-intensive applications -- will be highly anticipated by high-end desktop users, said IDC analyst Shane Rau, who said it's too early to comment on how the performance of AMD's Phenom will stack up to Intel's quad-core chips.

While the tech world continues buzzing about Monday's quad-core AMD Opteron processor launch, some are looking forward to the Intel rival's next chip phenomenon -- and it won't be long in coming.
AMD Phenom processors, which will leverage many of the same capabilities of the Opteron's next-generation architecture, should be available for the desktop market by December.

Of course, Intel has been running on the same course with AMD, announcing its Core 2 Extreme quad-core chips in April and getting them out the manufacturing door that same month. Intel is setting out to prove that anything AMD can do in the market for high-end chips, Intel can do better.

AMD Taking Aim

Here are some specs: All AMD Phenom processors will feature resources such as an integrated DDR2 memory controller, HyperTransport technology links, and 128-bit floating point units. These elements are all designed to improve performance.

In AMD's quad-core architecture, cores communicate on the die rather than through a front side bus external to the processor. AMD's Direct Connect Architecture is designed to ensure all four cores have optimum access to the integrated memory controller and integrated HyperTransport links so performance scales well with the number of cores, the company said.

The quad-core design also features a shared L3 cache for quicker data access and Socket AM2 and Socket AM2+ compatibility to enable seamless upgrades.

"AMD's quad-core processor rollout will put more computing horsepower at PC users' fingertips," observed Nathan Brookwood, research fellow at Insight 64. "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."

Intel Challenge

Intel is pushing the QX6800 Core 2 Extreme quad-core processor for gamers and others needing advanced multimedia performance. The QX6800 is up to 65 percent faster than Intel's Core 2 Extreme dual-core processor on video encoding, according to the company. This is a key capability as more people are recording and editing high-definition video to capture, preserve, and share memories.

Shane Rau, a chip analyst at IDC, declined to comment on how the two quad-cores compare because performance data has not been widely released for the AMD Phenom. What he did say, though, is that these new quad-core products from AMD and Intel target the top 2 percent of the desktop space. Gamers, digital content creators, and users running high-end apps are the target audience. It's an audience that seems to be ever hungry for more power.

"AMD essentially created this small segment of the market when it launched the Athlon 64 FX. At the time, Intel countered with the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition and has extended the Extreme Edition line through the new processors based on the Core architecture and Core 2 products," Rau said.

"I give AMD credit," he concluded. "The company identified a niche and designed toward it. The Phenom will be highly anticipated by high-end desktop users."

Resources : Newsfactor Network

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