It's time to wave farewell to AMD's Athlon brand and welcome in its place... er... Phenom. According to online reports, that's what AMD is going to start calling its high-end desktop chips.

The idea is that the name implies phenomenal performance, we guess, but f'nom doesn't work for us - it's too easy to glance at and read it as fee-nom. We don't know what fee AMD paid for this nom, but we don't feel it got value for money.

According to the DailyTech story that revealed the new name, AMD will be introducing the brand during the coming weeks as it prepares the ground for the introduction of its 'Agena' and 'Kuma' HyperTransport 3 processors in Q3.

Dual-core chips will ship as the Phenom X2 line, while quad-cores will be labelled Phenom X4.

Taking a leaf out of arch-rival Intel's book, AMD will also introduce a revised model numbering scheme that adds a power consumption rating to the performance indicator value its used before. The "energy efficient" (45W) versions of AMD's 65nm 'Brisbane' Athlon 64 X2 processor will be labelled BE-2300, BE-2350 and BE-2400, clocked at 1.9GHz, 2.1GHz and 2.3GHz, respectively, the site claims.

Their single-core Sempron equivalents, codenamed 'Sparta', will run from LE-1100 to LE-1300.

Hints that AMD was planning to revise its model number scheme first appeared back in December 2006.