Online Store Begins to Take Pre-Orders on AMD's FX-Series Zambezi Chips

From X-bit Labs: An online store has begun to accept pre-orders onto AMD's next-generation high-end desktop FX-series microprocessors code-named Zambezi. In case the pricing of the chips is correct, then AMD's six-core and eight-core central processing units (CPUs) will be more affordable than previously believed.

Bottom Line Telecommunications Corp. is currently offering to pre-order AMD FX-8150 processor for $266, AMD FX-8120 for $221 and AMD FX-6100 for $188. According to CPU World web-site, the prices of the news microprocessors should drop by $10 to $20 once the chips are released and AMD's official prices in 1000-unit quantities are usually $10 - $15 lower than the prices of production chips in this store. As a result, official pricing of the FX-8150 may be $245, FX-8120 should cost around $200 and the FX-6100 may carry a $160 price-tag.

Earlier it was believed that the top-of-the-range AMD FX-8150 should cost around $300 or higher and compete against Intel Corp.'s Core i7-2600K, which is priced at $317, in terms of performance. It now looks like the company has lowered certain expectations towards real-world performance of its FX-series processors.

At present AMD sells its flagship six-core Phenom II X6 central processing units for $165 - $205 in 1000-unit quantities. Given the fact that the six-core FX-6100 is projected to cost less than $188 in mass quantities, it is likely that the new Bulldozer micro-architecture will not offer performance breakthroughs compared to existing offerings. As a consequence, with such price-tags on the FX-series, Advanced Micro Devices will not be able to substantially increase average selling prices of its chips, a crucial task for the company that is merely profitable.

AMD Orochi design is the company's next-generation processor for high-end desktop (Zambezi) and server (Valencia) markets. The chip will feature up to eight processing engines, but since it is based on Bulldozer micro-architecture, those cores will be packed into four modules. Every module which will have two independent integer cores (that will share fetch, decode and L2 functionality) with dedicated schedulers, one "Flex FP" floating point unit with two 128-bit FMAC pipes with one FP scheduler. The chip will have up to 8MB L2 cache, shared 8MB L3 cache, new dual-channel DDR3 memory controller and will use HyperTransport 3.1 bus. The Zambezi chips will use new AM3+ form-factor and will require brand new platforms.

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