14 DAY TRIAL // After a few days with no official updates from AMD regarding Bulldozer's compatibility with regular AM3 motherboards, an official response has finally arrived and a company official has just stated that AMD will only support Bulldozer in AM3+ sockets.
The news comes straight from John Fruehe, AMD's director of Product Marketing for Server, Embedded and FireStream products, and the statement was posted as a response to a thread started on the XtremeSystems forum.
What this basically means is that, although Bulldozer desktop chips (code named Zambezi) will work in some regular AM3 motherboards that had their BIOS updated to recognize the processors, AMD won't actually support this and considers such a configuration just a hack.
The first rumors regarding Zambezi's compatibility with AM3 boards appeared during CeBIT 2011.
However, AMD was quick to call them untrue and said that Bulldozer processors could only work when installed inside AM3+ motherboards.
Nonetheless, after just a few weeks, Asus announced that six of its high-end AM3 motherboards are compatible with the Zambezi CPUs and that only a BIOS update is required for the processors to be properly recognized.
Right now, we don't know if going this route will limit the chip's capabilities in any way, but, judging by the wide number of AM3+ motherboards based on the 800-series chipsets that popped up in the last few days, it's fair to assume that the Bulldozer CPUs won't be hampered by these chipsets.
AMD's Zambezi CPUs use a modular construction and each module contains 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.
The processors are expected to arrive on June 11. At first, only four CPUs will be available (two eight-core, one six-core and one quad-core), and all are Black Edition parts.