In the wake of Intel's Santa Rosa notebook release last week, AMD trotted out a four-core desktop version of the widely anticipated Barcelona server quad on which its future rests. It said it hopes the desktop chip will be shipping in systems by the end of the year - in time, it would seem, for the Christmas rush.

Intel has a long lead over AMD in the quad department. AMD of course claims a superior "true quad" architecture that puts four cores on a single die rather than Intel's two dual-cores and now it's got something that resembles eight cores.

AMD's desktop part has been dubbed the Phenom family and is scheduled to appear in the "first all-AMD" enthusiast twin-socket platform code named FASN8 (say fascinate). AMD expects the chip to strut its graphical stuff on the company's new Direct 10 ATI Radeon HD 2000 chip, which started shipping Monday. The FASN8 platform includes a new chipset, AMD's answer to Intel's Centrino platform.

AMD claims the high-end Phenom is virtualization-ready and energy-efficient, offering optimal performance per watt. No specifics were given.

There is a dual-core version called the Phenom X2 as well as two quad versions, the FX and X4. The Athlon 64 X2 brand will be reserved for mainstream chip models.

Meanwhile, the new Radeon GPU, one of the reasons why AMD went in the hole to buy the $5.4 billion ATI, comes in flavors for both mobile and desktop. Aside from the gamers, it is supposed to be wizard at optimizing Vista's graphics capabilities.

AMD has priced a high-end Radeon 2900 XT card at $399, half an Nvidia piece. The entry-level 2400 and mid-range 2600 ship next month with pricing to be announced then.