14 DAY TRIAL // Since today we talked a little bit about Intel’s upcoming Devil’s Canyon and Core i7 “Haswell-E” HEDT platform, you should take a quick tour over the competition and see what’s going on in there, too.
So, we should stop for a visit on the AMD front to tell you that the company is readying a response for the upcoming Devil Canyon platform, in the form of a new FX-Series microprocessor.
And a few days ago the company once more asserted its commitment to penetrating the high-end desktop market. AMD's VP of Global Channel Sales, Roy Taylor, posted a teaser image on his Twitter account showcasing an FX processor packaging, which differs quite a lot from the current boxes in which AMD ships its FX products (as seen on ItWorld).
The photo has been posted under the tag “something new is coming” and looking at it we can tell that the FX chip in the box is apparently bundled with liquid cooling technology.
AMD says the new product is a processor, and a source familiar with the matter said the new FX desktop architecture would be a multi-core CPU, not an APU, aimed for high-end computing.
The liquid cooling technology that will arrive bundled with the new chips means the CPU will be targeted at overclockers. The new FX will also arrive fully unlocked and will be based on the Vishera blueprint and Piledriver.
We should remind you that last year AMD’s attempt to put up a fight with Intel’s newly launched Haswell processor came in the form of the two FX-class “Centurion.” The first one was the eight-core FX-9370 which came with clock speeds of 4.40/4.70GHz, 8MP L2 cache, 8MB L3 cache and 200W TDP (thermal design power).
While being worthy products, the FX-9000 series chips proved to deliver lower processors when compared to unlocked Haswell chips, specifically the Core i7-4770K and Core i5-4670K. So AMD appeared to have lost the battle and could not rise up to what Intel offered.
However, the company won’t be abandoning the race so quickly. Even if it didn’t manage to take Haswell down, it doesn’t mean it can’t try doing the same with Devil’s Canyon. A clean slate is a clean slate. Or is it?
The exact specs of the new FX chips are quite fuzzy at the moment, but we could speculate the base clock rate should be situated at least at 5GHz, if there’s any hope AMD will catch up to Intel.