14 DAY TRIAL // The first chips build using AMD's highly anticipated Bulldozer architecture will be released on June 11, according to the latest rumors that have hit the Web, just a few days after both Computex and E3 close their gates.
This report comes from the Donanim Haber website that talked with several motherboard manufacturers and found out that AMD wants to release the first Bulldozer-based desktop chips, dubbed Zambezi, on June 11.
Built from the ground up in order to eliminate some of the redundancies that come with traditional multi-core processors designs, Bulldozer has been in development for about 5 year now and is expected to bring a huge increase in performance over AMD's current CPUs.
In order to deliver on this promise, the chips use a modular construction and each module is made of two 128-bit FMA floating point units, which can be combined into one 256-bit FPU, two integer cores, with four pipelines each, as much as 2048KB of L2 cache, and 8MB of shared L3 cache.
From what we know until now, AMD plans to release four Zambezi processors in June, two eight-core, one six-core and one quad-core model, and all of them are part of AMD's Black Edition CPU series and support AMD's Turbo Core dynamic overclocking technology.
Depending on the number of cores, the amount of L2 cache available will range from 4MB to 8MB, while L3 cache can go up to 8MB.
The TDP is rated at 95W, except for the high-end FX-8130P CPU that has a TDP of 125W.
Performance wise, AMD expects the eight-core AMD FX-81x0 processors to be just as fast as Intel's Core i7-26xx CPUs while the six-core and quad-core FX-6110 and FX-4110 models should go up against the Core i5-25xx SKUs.
According to AMD, the processors will only be compatible with AM3+ motherboards, but a recent Asus announcement has confirmed that regular AM3 boards can also work with Zambezi CPUs after a simple BIOS update.