Later this year, AMD will unveil its Phenom processors in quad-core and dual-core iterations. Two quad-core chips will be available in the second half of the year, the Phenom FX and the Phenom X4, and a dual-core chip based on a similar design called the Phenom X2 will also appear by the end of the year.

The Phenom brand will become the moniker for AMD's performance chips going forward, said Leslie Sobon, director of the company's desktop division. The Athlon 64 X2 brand will remain for mainstream chips and Sempron will continue to bring up the rear, she said.

AMD is banking on its design philosophy behind the Phenom chips and their server counterparts, code-named Barcelona, as a way of making up for Intel's lead in the quad-core processor generation. Intel has been shipping quad-core chips for servers and high-end desktops since last year. Those chips are known as "multichip modules" because they are essentially two of Intel's dual-core chips welded together in a package.

But AMD chose to build a single chip with four cores, which the company believes will result in better performance because information will not have to leave one core to visit its neighbor. It's the same debate over an integrated memory controller and point-to-point links that propelled AMD's Opteron and Athlon 64 chips to prominence: Cores that are directly linked offer better performance than cores that have to exchange information by leaving the chip.