“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, in a press release. “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 is billing its quad-core chips as “true quad-core,” a reference to the fact that Intel’s quad-core chips, which have been shipping with new servers and premium desktops since last year, are essentially a pair of dual-core Intel chips linked together in a series. Instead of following Intel’s lead in coupling dual-core chips, AMD opted to create a single chip with four cores, believing that such architecture would result in better performance because data does not have to be exchanged between two chip sets.
Nathan Brookwood, a research fellow at Insight 64 said that AMD’s quad-core will “put more computing horsepower at PC users' fingertips.”
“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,” Brookwood said. “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.”
If history is any indication, videogame developers will be among the earliest adopters of the new quad-core technology.
“AMD’s new quad-core technology should provide a great performance boost for today’s high-end PC games,” said Tim Sweeney, founder of Epic Games Inc. “Our Unreal Engine 3 game technology can take advantage of four and even eight processor cores, improving performance by accelerating physics and AI calculations, and increasing the realism of the game environments our artists can build. Upcoming games like Unreal Tournament 3 will truly fly on these new CPUs.”
Analyst Roger Kay of Endpoint Technologies told The Financial Times that the quad-core announcement is crucial for AMD in terms of combating recent gains that Intel has made in the high-end processor market sector.
“AMD has needed to bring out new products to do something about the drumbeat of introductions that Intel has had,” said Kay. “Intel has closed the gap and then some over the past year so this is an important launch for AMD.”
According to AMD, the first desktop systems to feature quad-core and dual-core Phenom chips are expected to ship toward the end of this year.
