Yes, after months of waiting skepticism, waiting and more skepticism the Bulldozer "cat" is out of the bag with Newegg showing no less than three SKUs available as of now. So all of those diehards who bought mobos can head over for some Zambezi goodness.

 

Included are the top of the line FX-8150 (3.6GHz, 8 core), FX-8120 (3.1GHz 4core), and last but not least the FX6100 (3.3GHz 6 core). Reviews should be popping up all over the web today and we'll certainly point out those that appear positive and those that appear negative.

 

Stop back by later today for the goods.

Yes, a few days ago CPU World updated their database of chips and specs with the initial SKUs of the Valencia Processor (6-8 cores). There are no less than 11 of these puppies ranging from 32W to 75W (ACP) and 2.7GHz to 3GHz. There are two ranges; the standard band and the HEs as usual, but in this case most of the EE branded chips will be called 3200 instead of the 4200 for the 6-8 core chips. 

The 3200 series consists of:

Opteron 3250 EE	4	2.5 GHz	Unknown	45 Watt
Opteron 3260 EE	4	2.7 GHz	Unknown	45 Watt
Opteron 3280 HE	8	2.4 GHz	8 MB	65 Watt

 

while the 4200 series will feature:

 

Opteron 4226	6 cores	2.7 GHz	75 Watt
Opteron 4228 HE	6 cores	2.8 GHz	50 Watt
Opteron 4234	6 cores	3.1 GHz	75 Watt
Opteron 4238	6 cores	3.3 GHz	75 Watt
Opteron 4256 EE	8 cores	2.5 GHz	32 Watt
Opteron 4274 HE	8 cores	2.5 GHz	50 Watt
Opteron 4280	8 cores	2.8 GHz	75 Watt
Opteron 4284	8 cores	3 GHz	75 Watt

The most interesting chip here is without a doubt the 32W 8 cores 4256EE which has a clock speed of 2.5GHz. Pretty remarkable.

Word on the street has all of these chips including the 6200 and FX Series chips launching in two days on Wed Oct 12th so the wait is almost over. There has been much in terms of leaks of perf for the various SKUs but in a few days the suspense will subside as "real" benchmarks begin to come out of the Internet.

 

See ya then.

AMD has updated their Blogs to include info leading up the long-awaited launch of the Bulldozer 8 core CPU - known as FX Series. There is of course lots of hype and secrecy involved in this oh-so-important launch for the Number two X86 CPU maker. 

The CPU has broken the world record for overclocking and seemed to have attracted SLI back to the AMD platform even though nVidia has left the x86 chipset market. This means the launch is imminent and could well happen as soon as next week, with several stories around the web stating the launch is going to happen on Oct 12. If so this will beat the vaunted SandyBridge E processor from the incumbent Intel.

There have rumored benchmarks appearing all over the web but most have been exposed as fake but we should expect competitive perf from the new chips as members of the overclocking record team stated. So all of you drooling for some FX-goodness have a very short time to wait.

Digitimes reports that AMD's issues with 32nm Llano parts will last until 2012 once yields are up enough to fully meet demand.

Supply of AMD's Llano APUs, affected by Globalfoundries's lower-than-expected 32nm yield rates, has been significantly limited and is unlikely to recover until the company's upcoming Trinity arrives in 2012, according to sources from motherboard players. When asked about the company's upcoming Trinity schedule, AMD Taiwan declined to comment on unannounced products.

Recently, one of AMDs Fellows and chief technologists, Chuck Moore sat down to talk about the latest architectures and why they made the choices they did. Here's some higlights from an interesting chat.

On the shared resources element of “Bulldozer,” and the implications:

 
You can look at two cores next to each other and say surely there are some aspects of those two cores we could share. If I share them, I can save power or space.
Each core in a typical system is somewhat overprovisioned for those workloads that have an extreme amount of computing. By sharing some of the subsystems, what we’re able to do is not overprovision each core, but appropriately provision each core and share some of the subsystems like the floating-point unit. In fact, when either of the CPUs in a shared “Bulldozer” environment need to use the floating point unit, they have more capability than they would have in the past.
Here’s a good analogy; if you want to have a very, very, very fast sports car but you know you’re not going to use it every day but you know you have friends that also would like to have a sports car, perhaps you alternate every other week or every other day. Therefore, each one of you gets to use the fast sports car.
So when you want that high performance, you’ve got it. When you don’t need it, you have your average car, and things go along as normal. So the sharing is a way of reducing area, reducing power, and actually dealing with this overprovisioning problem, which left alone would contribute to higher power consumption.

 

Check out the rest here.