AMD's Phenom X4 set to "FASN8"quad-core fans

Just as we predicted a week ago, AMD has unveiled its new microprocessor offerings, including its first "native" quad-core chip. As we reported earlier, the quad-core offering bears the "Phenom X4" designation, while the dual-core little brother goes by "Phenom X2". Both of these chips will fall under the umbrella of AMD's new enthusiast platform "FASN8" (pronounced "fascinate")--a platform that will hopefully mark both the first and last time that AMD's marketing director takes a cue from his 14-year old daughter's text messages. Horrible naming aside, the company is already taking a swipe at Intel, boasting that the Phenom X4 will be the "industry's only true x86 quad-core architecture," and surely, it will be the first chip to cram all four of those sweet cores onto a single die. It remains to be seen whether this will lead to massive performance gains or just massively boastful press releases--we'll probably have to wait for the benchmarks to find out for sure.

For more on the Phenom chips and FASN8:
- see this press release