AMD Names Athlon's Successor: Phenom

[Foxy Brown]

We've been calling it Barcelona or Agena for several months now, but AMD has finally named its next-generation desktop processors; and the new name is Phenom.

[nox_xie]

Wow, great news..i'm an AMD fan.. still stick with socket-939.. will get one of that socket-1207+ later..

" Phenom will work in current Socket-AM2/Socket-1207 motherboards with a BIOS update, but it loses the ability to run its Northbridge and CPU cores at separate voltages/clock frequencies. If you buy a new Socket-AM2+/Socket-1207+ motherboard, then the CPU cores and Northbridge can run at separate voltages/frequencies. The benefit of doing this is not only power savings, but AMD has indicated that it can actually run the Northbridge faster than the CPU cores (by 200 - 400MHz) which will improve performance. The L3 cache happens to run on the same voltage plane and at the same frequency as the Northbridge, compounding the performance benefits of using a new "plus-socket" motherboard (Socket-AM2+/Socket-1207+)."

[nop]

I will buy one when it is as efficient as Core2. It might still be hotter overall though. Can't wait for a review.  I need another desktop soon and new AMD might not be out for awhile.

[ctz]

I don't care about the specs until it's time for me to buy new hardware, but the name Phenom... That's cool! It's like Venom from the Spider-Man, who is also cool... or "phear".

[Since1983]

Hopefully it can regain some ground after getting killed by Intel. It just seemed not too long ago that AMD was winning the war.

[Asmodai]

Core 2 Duo was a huge coup for Intel.

I'll wait and see on this one. My computer is less than a year old, so I won't be replacing the core parts any time soon.

[thatguy]

i don't expect the phenom to blow away intel. the most i think it'll do is level the playing field once more. 4x native cores (in barcelona/phenom) is a nice touch over intel's 2x dual-core package, but besides specific benchmarks, i don't see any major advantages unless many apps begin to ship with multithreading (not just dual-threading). i think what will happen is that this will turn into an application war, with intel taking back a large segment of the home-user and gaming markets (if they build a solid relationship with nVidia), and AMD continuing their increasing sales into the server market (itanium never caught on, but opteron sure has). it'll probably be a tossup among laptops--"performance-per-watt" doesn't specify which takes priority.

[marktobias]

AMD are good and Phenom is a good name.

I wish I had more to say on the subject... I used to be really into hardware but this reminds me how much I've lost touch

[NAzu]

Not really that excited about this. AMD just named the new architecture but no processors out yet. When they get the Phenom on the retail market and there's benchmarks from it I'm interested.

[jimmy]

I've been disapointed with AMD's recent offerings, hopefully this'll put them back at the top, but they've got stiff competition since Intel got it's ass in gear, which was a long time coming to be honest.