14 DAY TRIAL // After the more or less successful launch and acceptance of its native quad core equipped line of central processing units which are aimed at the server market segment, Advanced Micro Devices hopes to make a big comeback on the desktop market with its Phenom class of processors that are aimed at competing with the latest offering from Intel.
The top of the line Phenom class of processing units from Advanced Micro Devices will not come all at once but rather dispersed over the next three quarters, allowing the manufacturing company to come up with new iterations of the said processors every few months and eventually resolve any issues or provide occasional performance boosts.
The AMD Phenom line of products will be mainly divided into the 9 and FX series and they will have to compete against the Intel 45 nanometer offerings based on the Yorkfield core. The intermediate, three cored processing units will come under the general designation of Phenom 7 series and they will be placed as a middle level alternative between the quad and the dual offerings.
The first AMD Phenoms to hit the market will be the ones from the 9700, 9600 and 9500 series that will operate at clock speeds of 2.6, 2.4 and 2.3 GHz respectively. All these Phenom class processors will be built using the 65nm fabrication process and they will come equipped with 512KB of L2 cache memory per core as well as a big 2MB of L3 shared cache memory that will be used by all four processing cores. These processors will be based on the Agena core, just like the Phenom FX series that will arrive early next year.
The FX series will become the top of the line AMD processor offering and the very first processor from this line will be the FX-82 which will be clocked at 2.6GHz, just like the 9700 model. Several months later it is expected that AMD will launch two new processors, one from the 9000 series and one from the FX line, both clocked at 2.8GHz and with very alike features.
As AMD currently has no plans for a 3.0GHz or faster processing unit it looks like Intel keeps its performance crown for now, but most probably AMD will continue to offer the best price, performance ratio on the market, gaining more ground on the value market segment. According to the news site tcmagazine, the thermal envelope of the new AMD processors will start at 89 watts for the 9500 and 9600 series and will climb at 125 watts for the 9700 series, while the information concerning the TDP ratings of the FX family are not yet known.