14 DAY TRIAL // Asus has just made an announcement that seems to confirm the fact that AMD's upcoming Bulldozer processors will indeed be compatible with regular AM3 motherboards after the boards go through a simple BIOS update.
“Asus, the worldwide leader in motherboard design and sales, today announced the release of the industry's first AM3+ CPU enabled motherboard solution based on the existing AMD 8-Series Chipsets.
“Current owners of an AM3-based board can make their AMD 8-Series motherboards compatible with the latest AM3+ CPUs with a simple BIOS update from the official ASUS website,” reads an Asus statement that was cited by Nordic Hardware.
This is the second time that news regarding Bulldozer's supposed compatibility with the AM3 socket surface.
The previous report also cited some motherboard makers that said AM3 boards only require a BIOS update to become compatible with AMD's yet unreleased CPUs, but these rumors were quickly put to rest by a company official.
According to the same source, only the Crosshair IV Extreme, Crosshair IV Formula, M4A89TD PRO/USB3, M4A89TD PRO, M4A89GTD PRO/USB3 and M4A89GTD PRO motherboards are compatible with Bulldozer CPUs.
The BIOS-es are in beta and are available for download from Asus' FTP which can be accessed by following this link.
Together with these new BIOS versions, Asus has also announced that it will introduce no less than 10 M5A series motherboard models that will feature AM3+ CPU support out of the box.
Bulldozer is AMD's next-generation high-performance CPU architecture that was designed from the ground up in order to eliminate some of the redundancies that come with traditional multi-core designs.
As a result, the chip uses 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.
The first Zambezi chips will see the light of day in June 2011.
Update: The announcement has just went live on Asus' official website (here), so I gues the news is pretty much official.