Pricing Revealed for First AMD Bulldozer FX Chips
by Andrew Cunningham on September 12, 2011 2:00 PM ESTThough AMD began shipping Bulldozer-based sever CPUs last week, we're still waiting until Q4 for the new architecture to hit the desktop. In the meantime, however, pre-order pricing for the high-end FX-series CPUs (codenamed Zambezi) has been leaked, giving the AMD faithful an idea of how much the new processors will set them back.
| AMD Bulldozer FX-series Processors | |||||||
| Name | Cores | CPU Clock | L2 Cache | L3 Cache | TDP | Price | |
| FX-8150 | 8 | 3.6GHz (4.2GHz Turbo) | 8MB | 8MB | 125W | $266.28 | |
| FX-8120 | 8 | 3.1GHz (4GHz Turbo) | 8MB | 8MB | 125W | $221.73 | |
| FX-6100 | 6 | 3.3GHz (3.9GHz Turbo) | 6MB | 8MB | 95W | $188.32 | |
If you think that these prices seem too low for eight and six-core chips, remember that Bulldozer's architecture is such that a "dual-core" CPU is actually one core with two copies of several hardware features - the CPU is visible to the OS as two cores, but physically each of AMD's cores is somewhere in between Intel's HyperThreading implementation and a "true" dual-core design - you can read Anand's original Bulldozer post for more information on this.
The Bulldozer-based FX-series processors are targeted at the high-end of the market, and therefore do not include an on-board GPU. The 32nm processors will be available in Q4 of this year for socket AM3+ motherboards (and some socket AM3 motherboards with an updated BIOS, though these motherboards may not be able to take advantage of all of Bulldozer's new features).
Source: CPU World
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silverblue - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link
12 million is a great figure, I'm certainly not going to deny that, and there is some logic in delaying Bulldozer to maximise how much Llano they can get out the door (more money for AMD, after all), but even without spinning off their fabs, they face the same situation as with, say, K8 - huge demand and not enough capacity to fulfil it. It's a shame.Even so, I'll say it again - in terms of size as compared to Intel, AMD is more than punching its weight if you look in terms of desktop market share as well as all the design wins and product listings of their APUs. Getting the 6200 and 4200 products out before Zambezi was probably a smart thing to do - they need to address the big money spending markets, after all, and Zambezi isn't it, so whilst they make money, they drive us mad in the process. ;)
insurgent - Monday, September 12, 2011 - link
I hope it's the same as when the ATI 4800 series came out, cheaper but very competitive albeit power hungry.rnssr71 - Monday, September 12, 2011 - link
it has already been stated by AMD that BD will beat k10 and k10.5 core to core, clock to clock. the question is 'by how much?'.also, one module, two cores will have 80+ percent more performance than a single core. a true duel core has 90+ percent more performance depending on the bottlenecks and how well the code is optimized for more than one core. so, really, AMD has done well with this and will most likely improve on it in the future.
my guess is that BD, core to core, clock to clock, will be around nehalem/westmere performance wise with lower power consumption.....maybe a LITTLE higher. thus, higher clock speeds at launch and lower prices that we're seeing to compete with SB.
RussianSensation - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link
"will be around nehalem/westmere performance wise with lower power consumption.....maybe a LITTLE higher."0 chance this will happen, literally 0. There is no way AMD is going to sell a $266 FX-8150 processor clocked at 3.6ghz with IPC of Nehalem. Such a CPU would be 2x faster than 2500k in multi-threaded apps, and even beat the $999 Core i7-990X. Considering HT only adds about 15-25% performance increase (best case) and about 10% on average, a 6C/12T 990X would have no chance at all against an 8 Core Nehalem 3.6ghz processor.
If AMD had such an amazing CPU lined up, they wouldn't have delayed it for 9 months, or done 4-5 re-spins to get its clock speeds higher.
On top of that, when AMD had excellent CPUs (A64, X2, FX), they never priced them below Intel's. FX8150 may beat 2500k in multi-threaded apps, but it won't stand a chance in 1-4 threaded apps. But it sounds like AMD focused more on servers and markets that need 8 cores.
neotiger - Monday, September 12, 2011 - link
They've begun shipping already but STILL no benchmarks?This can only mean 1 thing: the performance sucks big time. If it were halfway decent benchmark data would've been "leaked" long ago.
Iketh - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link
I think what everyone is forgetting is BD is 125w without a GPU and SnB is 95w WITH a GPU... so i have a feeling performance might actually reach SnB, but performance:watt ratio is gonna blow, thus the lower pricingsilverblue - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link
TDP isn't really an accurate indicator here unless Bulldozer routinely pushes cores up in speed as close as it can get to the stated limit. The power consumption graphs are just as important as the performance data, really.Iketh - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
well of course, but with such a large difference in manufacturer-stated power envelops, it's safe to make that assumptionand really what i was implying is the cores of SnB always run below 95w and leaves the room available for the GPU, which is not the case thanks to turbo
Beenthere - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link
Zambezi will also be available in 95W versions too just like the Phenom II series so not to fret over power consumption. Trinity which is a Bulldozer core based APU, will be as low as 17.5W.Angels77 - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link
Anyone ?