AMD Piledriver FX Chips Enter Mass Production in Q3

The Bulldozer AMD FX series of central processing units ended up disappointing most people, even though the chip did exactly what AMD said it would.

That said, we'll be more cautious in our assumptions regarding the FX-series central processing units that will replace them. Speaking of which, we now know when the first Piledriver FX chips will enter mass production. The information made its way to the Internet not too long ago. Advanced Micro Devices will give the green light for volume production in the third quarter of this year (2012). That's July-September, just before the back-to-school season, which may or may not work in the company's favor.

The first client models, or some of them, will use the so-called “Vishera” silicon and will be named FX-8350, FX-6300 and FX-4320. The first is an eight-core, a replacement of sorts for the FX-8150, while the second has six cores and the third is a quad-core. It may be worth saying that these products have been spotted before, in a roadmap slide, but the “x” in their names was mistaken for a different sort of prefix. At any rate, there is no information on the clock speeds and such, but we do know with a reasonable degree of certainty that the Piledrives FX will operate on the existing AM3+ CPU socket, so people won't have to buy new motherboards.

Turbo Core 2.0 will be present, ready to boost frequencies in a pinch, and so will a DDR3-1866 MHz memory controller. The only differences between the upcoming FX and Bulldozer are that the IPC (performance to clock-speed ratio) will be higher and that the energy efficiency will be superior as well (thanks to resonant clock mesh technology). Now we just have to hope that the Sunnyvale, California-based company won't give the wrong number of transistors again. When Bulldozer was first revealed, and even after the launch, everyone, reviewers included, knew that the silicon had 2 billion transistors. It was quite some time before AMD saw the error and said there were only 1.2 billion.

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