With Intel’s Core microarchitecture dominating the market today, it’s no wonder that AMD is taking damage from its Santa Clara, CA-based rival, since the days of 64-bit dominance are long gone and forgotten.

Until exactly a year ago, AMD dominated the market with its innovative architecture for processors, which was so powerful for that time that even the company’s long-time rival Intel licensed it and later integrated it into its line of CPUs, under the name EMT64.

However, although it had to slash jobs worldwide and admit that its market share diminished, Intel eventually regained the upper hand with the debut of the energy-efficient Core microarchitecture, which is now at the base of every Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad out there.

Now, AMD is trying to fight back with the newly announced “Phenom” family of processors and with a platform for gaming enthusiasts called FASN8 (pronounced “fascinate”). The latter has only been previewed during a press event at San Francisco and according to AMD it is the first true eight core platform. The demonstration platform included two true quad-core AMD Phenom processors, the new DirectX 10 ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT, as well as an upcoming AMD next-generation, high-performance chipset, due in the second half of 2007.

“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. “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.”

According to AMD, all Phenoms will come equipped with DDR2 integrated controllers, virtualization-ready and 128-bit Floating Point Units technologies and the company’s proprietary HyperTransport technology links.

On AMD Phenom processors cores communicate on the die rather than through a front side bus external to the processor – a bottleneck inherent in other products that are packaging two dual-core chips to form quad-core processors.

“AMD’s quad-core processor rollout will put more computing horsepower at PC users' fingertips,” observed Nathan Brookwood, research fellow at Insight 64. “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. 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.”