Advanced Micro Devices, the world’s second largest manufacturer of x86 central processing units (CPUs) will delay the roll-out of its new enthusiast-class platform to next year, according to sources familiar with the plans of AMD.

The chipmaker only plans to unveil its AMD Phenom FX-80 processor, which is designed for single-processor configurations, in November or December this year, whereas AMD Phenom FX-90 and FX-91 products are set to be released sometime in the first quarter of 2008, sources close to AMD indicated. The move basically delays the introduction of AMD’s FASN8 platform, which employs two CPUs and puts AMD’s success in the field of computer enthusiasts under question.

AMD Phenom FX-80 quad-core processor is projected to operate at 2.20GHz – 2.40GHz clock-speed, have 2MB of L2 cache (512KB per core), 2MB shared L3 cache, dual-channel PC2-8500 (DDR2 1066MHz) memory controller and AM2+ form-factor with HyperTransport 3.0 bus support. The AMD Phenom FX-90 and FX-91 models are expected to operate in 2.20GHz – 2.60GHz clock-speed ranges and support dual-processor configurations.

The delay of the new CPUs for dual-processor enthusiast platforms essentially postpones the rollout of AMD’s new enthusiast-class platform that the chipmaker calls first AMD silicon next-gen 8-core (FASN8), which features a number of innovations beyond just eight processing engines’ computing power.

Besides two “native” quad-core AMD Phenom FX processors, AMD plans to put four graphics cards inside FASN8 systems, the company revealed at Computex Taipei 2007 trade-show. As a result, extreme computer gamers and performance enthusiasts will obtain eight processing engines as well as four graphics processing units (GPUs). The new platform will be build upon AMD’s 790 core-logic, which supports HyperTransport 3.0 and more than 32 PCI Express 2.0 lanes.

Officials from AMD did not comment on the news-story.