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The full extent of AMD’s triple product launch was made public today with the unveiling of its new platform, codenamed Spider.
Spider consists of the brand new quad core processor, the Phenom 9000 series (the Phenom 8000 series is triple core), the new HD 3800 graphics card series and the new 7-series chipset. AMD hopes Spider will "Extend its leadership in HD technology, energy-efficiency and enthusiast gaming."
"AMD is the only company committed to delivering The Ultimate Visual Experience across all the screens of your life," said Dirk Meyer, president and COO of AMD. "The AMD Spider platform embodies our approach to platform-level innovation and delivers a highly-advanced, feature-rich enthusiast computing experience. Our commitment to energy-efficient design and manufacturing excellence drives an unprecedented performance-per-watt at an amazing price point, putting enthusiast-class platforms in reach for more users than ever before."
In other words, top performance at affordable prices. This promise appears to be true with the GPU, which was unveiled last week. If Phenom compares as well to equivalently priced Intel processors, AMD can consider itself to be very much back in the game.
AMD’s press release itemises the new Phenom processors as the 9600 (2.3GHz) and 9500 (2.2GHz), which it claims are now available for $283 and $251 respectively in 1,000-unit pricing. However, as yet there is no evidence that you can actually buy one and a retail source has told PC Retail there is now information comping from AMD on this.
HD 3800 GPUs are being priced on the web at around £155 for the 3870 and £115 for the 3850, which compares favourably to around £180 for the Nvidia 8800 GT, but our source reports a shortage of those cards, although not as chronic as for the 8800 GT. The Phenom will have to go some to offer superior bang-per-buck to the Intel Q6600, which can be found at around the £160 mark.
