It’s been a long time coming, but a quick peek through the internet air waves reveal that AMD is getting back on track after being sidelined by a crippled buffer – related glitch way back in late December of 2007 – an eternity in the computer industry. Perhaps this heralds more than the CPU getting back on track.

As an avowed AMD loyalist, I‘ve been waiting for a breakthrough product from AMD since the days of the 939-socket Athlon 64 X2 4800+. Suffice to say that every delay and misstep from the company brought disappointment for me and my fellow fanboys. Said disappointments does not include so-called benchmark numbers for early samples of the Phenom – even if proven slower, the architecture is sound and scalable. The true quad-core Phenoms would be my next major upgrade, as soon as prices settled and production numbers increased.

                                              A Phenom's four discrete cores.

Fortunately, AMD’s Phenom 9700 and 9900 are now on track for an “early April” release – according to Daily Tech. Expect these 1.8GHz to 2.4GHz Phenoms to be so sold under the 9750 and 9950 monikers, as AMD originally stated that these new B3- revision chips will be reintroduced as new updates to the (actually unreleased) 9700 and 9900 chips. This reintroduction is due to AMD’s efforts in fixing the buffer error discovered late last year without requiring a bios upgrade on the part of the consumer – always a good thing even for the accomplished tweaker. Higher clocked models have been pushed to a 3^rd quarter release – now nearly a sure thing because of the removal of the buffer problem.

                                             Soon to be available in 9750 and 9950 flavors.

This development happily coincides with AMD’s return to grace in the GPU side of the business, finally making dreams of having a whole AMD ecosystem under (or in) one casing an eventual possibility. The 3870 X2, while still struggling under the burden of the 8.2 (and even the 8.3) drivers, is a huge step forward in the high-end of the GPU scale, giving AMD a badly needed “halo product”. AMD is hard at work at the next step, perhaps in anticipation of Intel’s release of the 9800 GX2 and the 9800 GTX videocards.

                                             A CrossFire setup - now a more viable alternative to SLI with the 3870 X2.

As I noted in a previous article, competition in the computer industry is essential – we can’t have one company slowing down because there’s no-one snapping at their heels, making them release good products at low prices. And if internet musings are to be believed, AMD is currently in the “slump” cycle of the two major graphics companies up-and-down tango of market dominance – it’s only a matter of time before AMD gets its grip and cause Nvidia to start looking behind their back. Which makes this AMD fan very happy.  Not to jump the gun or anything, but these developments give me a warm, fuzzy feeling, and a renewed hope that AMD will soon do another “Athlon64” – like the bombshell they dropped on the Pentium4 series and thereafter used to dominate over a period of years.