Aug 3, 2011 19:31 GMT  ·  By

Soon after AMD will launch its first FX-Series desktop processors based on the Bulldozer architecture, the company is set to unveil a new triple-core chip built using the same design that was specially developed for AMD's OEM clients.

The chip will be called the FX-3150, and its existence has been confirmed independently, by two different Asian publications, Digitimes and HKEPC.

From the information that is available at this point we know that the CPU will have a base clock of 3.6GHz, it won't include any Level 3 cache (presumably this was disabled) and that it will feature a TDP of 80W.

Unfortunately, how AMD managed to built a triple-core chip by using the Bulldozer architecture remains a mystery as neither of the two publications explained the processor's design.

The main problem is that FX-Series CPUs are built by joining together a series of dual-core Bulldozer models, each such module being comprised of two 128-bit FMA floating point units, which can be combined into one 256-bit FPU, two integer cores, with four pipelines each and as much as 2048KB of L2 cache.

In order to build a triple-core processors, AMD would have to disable only a part of module, leaving the shared components intact.

In September or October of this year, AMD plans to launch four FX-Series desktop processors based on the Bulldozer architecture, the most powerful of which being the FX-8150P.

This includes four Bulldozer processor modules for a total of eight computing cores, 8MB of Level 2 cache as well as 8MB of Level 3 cache.

The chip will sport a base frequency of 3.6GHz, which can be increased up to 4.2GHz thanks to the Turbo Core technology, and its TDP is set at 125W.

The remaining three processors, the FX-8100, FX-6100 and FX-4100, will include eight, six and four processing cores, respectively.