86 SHARES Share Tweet

AMD's journey to bring Bulldozer to market has taken a lot longer than everyone hoped for, including AMD itself, but the word is that the launch will take place on the 19th of September now. AMD will only have four new Bulldozer CPUs at launch, all carrying the FX brand, although the initial four models should be followed by another four in early 2011.

AMD's journey to bring Bulldozer to market has taken a lot longer than everyone hoped for, including AMD itself, but the word is that the launch will take place on the 19th of September now. AMD will only have four new Bulldozer CPUs at launch, all carrying the FX brand, although the initial four models should be followed by another four in early 2011.

At launch we can expect two 8-core models, a 6-core and a 4-core model, namely the FX-8150, FX8100, FX-6100 and FX-4100, at least if the latest reports are accurate. The FX-8150 is said to have a base clock of 3.6GHz for all eight cores, but it can turbo to 4.2GHz when only some cores are in use. The FX-8100 has a base clock of 2.8GHz and can turbo to 3.7GHz, with the FX-6100 coming it at 3.3GHz with a turbo clock of 3.9GHz and finally the FX-4100 is said to be clocked at 3.6GHz with an unimpressive turbo clock of 3.8GHz. All four CPUs have 1MB of L2 cache per core and 8MB of shared cache.

The upcoming 2012 models are said to be the FX-8170, FX-8120, FX-6120 and FX-4120. The clock speeds aren't set in stone as yet, but the FX-8170 is expected to have a base clock of 3.9GHz with a turbo clock of 4.5GHz, the FX-8120 starts at 3.1GHz and turbo's to 4GHz, the FX-6120 goes from 3.6GHz to 4.2GHz and finally the FX-4120 from 3.9GHz to 4.1GHz.

All models are unlocked Black Edition CPUs with native support for DDR3 1866MHz memory and a 95W TDP, although the FX-8150 and FX-8170 are expected to have a 125W TDP. We're still nearly two months away from the launch and we can only hope that there will be some early leaks in terms of benchmark figures. In as much as we're sure that AMD has managed to create a competent range of multi-core CPUs with its new FX models, the big question that remains is how they'll stack up against Intel's Sandy Bridge processors.

The sad thing for AMD is that more cores doesn't automatically make for a better CPU, especially as we're still waiting for applications that can take advantage of all the cores in a modern CPU. Hopefully Windows 8 will help bring better support for the additional cores, but we're not going to hold our breath, as Microsoft has yet to prove that they acknowledge consumer CPUs with more than a pair of cores.

Source: HKEPC