14 DAY TRIAL // AMD UK has just announced a promotional cashback program that will give the company’s customers who purchase FX-Series processors up to £20 (23.8 EUR or $31 US) back from the shelf price of the CPU.
The program is available to all the FX-Series chips, but the amount given back varies according to the number of cores installed in the CPU bought, so quad-core chip owners get back £10, six-core owners get £15, while those who went for an eight-core CPU will receive the full £20.
In order to register for this promotion, consumers have to buy their CPU from a participating reseller between 5th December 2011 and 31st January 2012.
After purchasing their CPU, users have to complete an online claim form and upload a proof of purchase here before the closing date of 18th February 2012.
After these steps are completed, AMD’s customers will receive a payment through BACS or cheque as requested within 45 days.
AMD launched the first FX-Series processors based on the Bulldozer architecture on October 12, but despite being eagerly awaited by many PC enthusiasts the performance of the chips has disappointed.
In most tests that were run by reviewers, AMD's FX-8150, lagged behind the Intel's Core i5-2500K, while a few tests showed it coming behind even a last-gen Phenom II X6 1100T processor.
In order to fix some of these performance issues, AMD is apparently working on developing a B3 stepping of the Bulldozer architecture that should be launched sometime next year.
Furthermore, AMD is also preparing together with Microsoft a patch that is supposed to optimize the Windows scheduler for these heavily multi-threaded processors, but this also isn’t expected to come out until the first quarter of the next year.