14 DAY TRIAL // It?s no surprise that AMD gets kicked out the door whenever one talks about performance. The new Core 2 Duo architecture has changed the balance to INTEL?s side once again. And AMD doesn?t like that. The question that arises here is what are they going to do next?
AMD is trying to keep its CPU line alive while at the same time it develops its future CPUs. For now it seems that lowering the prices has only produced a similar response from INTEL. Good for us, bad for them. Talking about the upcoming CPUs, AMD will end the ?Cities? line and will only produce cores with ?Star? names.
Agena FX, Agena, Kuma, Rana and Spica are next on AMD?s pipeline. Hyper Transport 3.0 will interconnect all future AMD northbridges to the CPU, offering twice as much bandwidth compared to the actual HTT technology. Combined with the split power plane technology this will help improve the response time on the HTT bus.
All future CPUs coming from AMD will incorporate 128-bit FPUs, DDR2-1066/1333 support (with DDR3 also available programmed in a new revision) and SSE4 instructions. Split power plane means that separate PLLs for the CPU and northbridge will be used.
First star CPU to arrive is Agena-FX, being also the first native quad core CPU. It will use 1207+ LGA socket while its vanilla flavored brother (Agena) will use AM2+ socket. These CPUs are expected to have a working frequency of 2.7GHz - 3GHz and will arrive in the 3rd quarter of 2007 with a TDP of 125W and carrying 2MB of level 2 cache but also 2MB of level3 cache. Needless to say that all the CPUs coming from AMD will be manufactured under 65nm process.
Kuma will differ from Agena only in terms of TDP (65W, 89W) and level 2 cache size (only 1MB). It will be a dual core CPU and will use the same AM2+ socket. As for Rana and Spica, there are no details concerning the speeds but we do know that they will be mainly single cores designed to replace actual Venice/Sempron line. They will also use AM2+ socket.
The future looks bright for AMD. Probably because it?s full of stars. Let?s hope that the new CPU line coming from AMD produce the surprise everyone?s waiting for.