14 DAY TRIAL // After months of rumors and leaks, Advanced Micro Devices has launched the FX “Vishera” series of central processing units for desktops, based on the Piledriver CPU micro-architecture.
The last time we heard about Vishera, the best of the lot (FX-8350) had been overclocked to 7,442.83 MHz.
Even before that, however, we knew that the chips would sell for $199 / 199 Euro or below, and that they would have an updated instruction set and, of course, performance superior to the first Bulldozer chips.
The updated instructions are easy to understand, since a new architecture usually includes such things by nature. For those that want specifics, the most relevant are SSE/2/3/S3/4.1/4.2/4A, AVX, AES-NI, FMA/FMA2/FMA3, XOP, and F16C.
As far as RAM goes, Vishera can handle up to 64 GB of dual-channel DDR3, at standard speed DDR3-1866 (more via overclocking of course).
That said, the aforementioned strongest chip, 8-core FX-8350 with 8 MB L3 cache, has a price of $195, or 195 Euro in Europe.
The second strongest, FX-8320, also an 8-core unit, got an MSRP of $169 / 169 Euro. It has 8 MB cache, like its sibling.
Third in the series, FX-6300, is a 6-core CPU with, again, 8 MB L3 cache. Its price is of $132 / 132 Euro.
The fourth and final chip, FX-4300, is a quad-core with 4 MB L3 cache and a price of $122 / 122 Euro.
All chips have 1 MB of L2 cache memory (per core) and may end up with market prices 5-10% higher than the ones AMD has given. At least we can be sure that all AM3+ motherboards support the newcomers, even if some will need BOS updates.
Only the high-end platforms will have what is needed to make use of their unlocked multipliers though. Then again, overclockers are few in the grand scheme of things, so that shouldn't be too much of a problem.