AMD Kicks Off Quad-Core Phenom Chips

Just when system builders thought it was safe to settle down and build systems, here comes AMD with another huge product launch, the Phenom microprocessor and the Spider platform for high-performance gaming systems. Released Monday, Phenom is the first quad-core desktop chip from Advanced Micro Devices, while Spider is the first real CPU-GPU-chipset combo built from the ground up by AMD since its acquisition of graphics house ATI last year.

If you're keeping score at home, major new product releases from chipmakers in just the past few weeks include: AMD's Phenom, Spider, the ATI Radeon HD 3800 GPU series, a stream computing chip called the FireStream 9170, and the first quad-core Opteron server chips; Intel's first Penryn-class server and desktop chips built with its new 45nm process, as well as an upgrade to its vPro desktop processors; and Nvidia's GeForce 7 chipsets.

And that's just the big stuff from the main x86 houses, leaving out the various toolkits, compilers and libraries each has released in recent weeks.

AMD's Spider launch starts with Phenom. Approaching a year since Intel released its first quad-core desktop product, the smaller chipmaker finally has one of its own. Phenom comes on the heels of September's launch of AMD's first quad-core server chip. Unlike Barcelona, though, Phenom isn't a codename -- it's a new brand, replacing Athlon as the latest and greatest desktop CPU from the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based chipmaker.

AMD's native quad-core micro-architecture gives Phenom certain advantages over Intel's Core 2 Quad desktop processors, particularly in areas of memory and power usage. The only question is whether Intel's move to hafnium with its 45nm process makes up enough ground in those areas to nullify that advantage as both chipmakers ramp up their new products in the coming months. With AMD set to move to the 45nm process next year -- Phenom is a 65nm product -- and Intel unveiling new micro-architecture, codenamed Nehalem, that will look a lot like AMD's, each chipmaker's relative advantages over the other look to be narrow for some time to come, so long as AMD can keep pace with its bigger competitor.

The first Phenom releases slot nicely into the value bin for quad-core desktop chips. The two chips AMD launched Monday are mainstream products that compete on price and performance with similar chips from Intel, said Velocity Micro's Randy Copeland.

"I think they've got plenty of room to continue ramping. But this is a mainstream product, maybe aimed at the high end of the mainstream customer base, somebody who's still looking for value. We launched the Penryn [Core 2 Extreme QX9650] processor last week, but that's really targeted at a different customer," said Copeland, president of the Richmond, Virg.-based system builder.

The Phenom 9500 has a clock speed of 2.2GHz and is priced at $251 for Monday's launch. The Phenom 9600 clocks in at 2.3GHz and costs $283. Chips clocking 2.4GHz will be ready by January, 2.6GHz is coming in Q1 2008 and 3.0GHz will arrive on shelves in the first half of next year, said Patrick Moorhead, AMD's VP of advanced marketing for its Worldwide Marketing Group.

"In the second week of December, there will also be a 2.3GHz unlocked part available, a real channel kicker. We did a couple of black editions with Athlon, and while this won't be a black edition, it will be completely unlocked," Moorhead said.

Also coming soon is the Phenom FX-80 series for high-end gaming systems and the triple-core Phenom 8000 series, the latter in Q1 of next year.

According to AMD, both the Phenom 9500 and 9600 draw on 95W of power, have 2MB of dedicated L2 cache, 2MB of L3 cache, and 3600MHz of bi-directional HyperTransport speed. That's version 3.0 of AMD's HyperTransport technology, providing bandwidth for high-definition 1080P video playback. Other features include 128-bit floating point units, improved branch prediction and a 128-bit dual-channel integrated memory controller supporting up to DDR2 1066, when that technology gets JEDEC approval and DDR2-1066 specs are released. As per AMD's native multi-core design, all cores, the memory controller and a separate I/O interface commune through a high-performance crossbar switch.

Next: Along Came A Spider