AMD K10 gets a name: Phenom

[Alpine]

Desktop product family expands with Phenom FX/X4/X2 brands

AMD IS PREPARING a major overhaul of its branding conventions.


For the launch of long-expected K10 marchitecture, AMD decided to rebrand its desktop line-up, and finally decided to drop the PR ratings - which quite frankly, make equal sense as the ratings offered by Intel's Pentium and Core 2 line-ups.

We are hoping that sooner or later, reason will once again come to life and CPUs will be branded with real clock speeds- everything else just confuses the consumer, and this is the ticket where both AMD and Intel are counting on.

"Barcelona for Desktop" is the name for Agena FX, the real populator of QuadFX motherboards. This quad-core CPU comes with quite a lot of cache (256KB of L1, 2MB of L2 and 2MB of L3 cache) and sits in either S1207 or S1207+ socket. All products with this core will be named the Phenom FX. Agena without the FX moniker is nothing else but "Barcelona AM2+", or the Barcelona core for the single-socket use and will be branded as Phenom X4. Hardware-wise, specs remain the same, only real difference is the number of HyperTransport 1.0/3.0 links.

Things get interesting in the Phenom X2 arena. Kuma is the name of the dual-core Agena, which sports the same amount of L3 cache, and L1 and L2 are changed accordingly to number of cores (64KB L1 and 512LB L2 cache per core are main similarity between K10 cores).

Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 X2 will remain in the line-up, just like Intel is now re-introducing Pentium brand as a gap-filler between Celeron and Core line-ups. The "new" Athlon 64 X2 is based on Rana core, with some improvements over existing Brisbane lines of cores. Athlon 64 should be based on a single-core Spica, and the future of the Sempr0n line-up is rather murky - since both Rana and Spica were poised to take a role of Sempron processors, not fully-fledged Athlons.

Since this information is preliminary, we would advise you to take the info with a grain of salt when it comes to Athlon 64 and Sempr0n, but one thing is certain - Phenom is here to stay. We can only guess that AMD marketeers sorted out all the copyright shenaningans over a brand name, since Phenom is not an original name - it was even a name of Midway's basketball game.

We expect that Phenom will be unveiled to the world either during the Computex Taipei trade show, or a bit earlier. Chipsets should be ready by Computex timeframe, and then you can expect real showing of AMD's next-gen offerings. We only wonder will AMD launch a Quad-CrossFire product then, or will Chris E. have to run on the stage again (to get the microphone away from AMD exec which plans to do a Ferrari on a competition).
The INQuirer