Although AMD publicly planned a 2H 2007 introduction back in May, news of a November release of the company"s quad-core Phenom desktop processor line has recently come out of Taipei. Phenom is now the official product name for what was previously known by the code name "Agena". AMD appears to be poised to drop three quad Phenom parts and one dual-core Phenom before 2007 is out. Five additional quads and six more dual-core Phenoms will join the family in 2008. An added sales pitch for Phenom is that it can support two-socket motherboards. This means you will be able to pack eight total physical cores into one desktop.
The Athlon 64 FX chips are expected to remain but other Athlon CPUs are probably on their way out. It"s also likely that AMD will add some new Athlon 64 FX SKUs, with higher clock speeds, to the family. As for the Athlon X2 line, which qualifies as AMD"s "mainstream" dual-core family, the center of gravity appears to be moving away from the tried-and-true 90-nm parts such as the 4X00+, 5X00+ and 6000+ line. The Athlon X2 action has shifted to 45nm parts fabricated using 65-nm SOI (silicon-on-insulator) technology. Expect to see more SKUs in roughly the same timeframe as the Phenom intros.