A set of new slides by AMD to sections of the industry spills the beans on AMD's processor offer outlook for perhaps the rest of the year. It shows AMD to maintain focus on value-oriented models that etch away Intel's market share on grounds of price/performance, while the higher-end of the spectrum keeps up with the latest technologies including the industry-wide advent of the six-core processor era, as well as new power-state management technologies such as TurboCore, which steps up clock speeds of certain cores of the processors while powering down others, which the load is low or less-parallel.
Front-line processor lineups include the Phenom II X6, and Phenom II X4, including a new T X4 series that includes TurboCore support. AMD's transition towards these chips from the existing Deneb-based quad-core ones starts within this quarter lasting throughout Q2 and part of Q3 2010. It includes Phenom II X4 960T, a 3.00 GHz (3.40 GHz turbo) chip based on the Zosma die. It goes up with the Phenom II X6 1035T, a six-core chip clocked at 2.60 GHz (3.10 GHz turbo). A notch higher up is the Phenom II X6 1055T, clocked at 2.80 GHz (3.30 GHz turbo), which comes in 95W and 125W variants. At the top is the Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition, an overclocker-friendly chip that runs at 3.20 GHz (3.60 GHz turbo). A little later in Q3, AMD will add in the Phenom II X6 1075T, clocked at 3.00 GHz (3.50 GHz turbo).
All these chips come in the AM3 package, but AMD assures from its side that the chips are compatible with existing AM2+ motherboards with DDR2 memory, leaving it to the motherboard vendors to provide the BIOS updates required to run these chips. Perhaps to favour compatibility, the HyperTransport 3.0 interface on all these new chips will operate at 2000 MHz (4.0 GT/s), with maximum CPU bandwidth of 37.3 GB/s.
During the aforementioned transition period, AMD will gradually phase-out some SKUs to make room for new ones. With the Deneb-based Phenom II X4 800 (Deneb with 4 MB L3 cache), Phenom II X4 810 will be phased out by Q2. Phenom II X3 720 will also be phased out around that time, and so will Phenom II X4 900e and Phenom II X4 945. The Phenom II X4 905e leaves in Q3.
Source: techPowerUp
