AMD may not have chips capable of challenging Intel's Sandy bridge units right now, but it is only a matter of time before the Bulldozer processors come out for real, four of which were detailed a short while ago.
Several weeks ago, Intel and its partners were forced to halt sales of all Sandy Bridge products because the 6-Series Cougar Point chipset was found to be plagued by a flaw which caused SATA 3.0 Gbps ports to degrade over time.
This left a sort of vacuum on the market for mainstream and high-end motherboards and notebooks, vacuum which, ironically, AMD was unable to fill.
This was because the Fusion APUs already available on the market were only low-end ones, for netbooks and ultraportables.
Now, finally, some exact info has made its way to the web on four of the FX Bulldozer chips, otherwise known as Zambezi.
In addition to a quad-core (FX-4110) and a six-core (FX-6110) model, there will be two eight-core ones, known as FX-8130P and FX-8110.
Unlike the ones mentioned above, they are not based on the Fusion architecture, so they lack built-in graphics.
What they do possess, however, is an integrated DDR3-1866 controller, an unlocked multiplier for overclocking and support for the Turbo Core dynamic overclocking technology.
Additionally, the four-core unit has 4 MB of L2 cache, while the six and 8-core ones have 6 MB and 8 MB, respectively. Finally, their TDP is of 95W, except that of the FX-8130P, which is rated at 125W.
Some may be interested in knowing that the Globalfoundries 32nm process technology will be used in the chips' creation.
All four central processing units should make it to market sometime during the second quarter of the ongoing year (2011), probably in June. They will be compatible with AM3+ sockets and should have clocked of around 3 GHz or more.
