14 DAY TRIAL // Chip manufacturer Advanced Micro Devices will introduce its newest tri-core processors in the Toliman family later this week. The first PC vendors to grab the units are, of course, Hewlett-Packard and Dell. Dell has already announced a new series of low-end computers based on AMD's Tolimans, while HP will introduce its computers later this week.
Dell has announced new computers in the Optiplex family. Designed to aim at the sub-$600 market, the Optiplex workstations will be the first to meet AMD's new tri-core processors. Hewlett-Packard's workstations will arrive in a short while and will compete on the same market (the sub-$600 and sub-$500). However, Dell will not introduce AMD's Tolimans into any of its Inspiron desktop systems.
The new computing systems will replace the Optiplex and Pavilion computers that are currently powered by AMD Athlon X2 dual-core processors. As a matter of fact, even Advanced Micro Devices has announced that it will phase out its Athlon X2 lineup, yet repeated delays in its Phenom family keep the K8 architecture as a "next best" solution.
The Toliman processors will feature stock core frequencies of 2.3 GHz tops and will come with the same feature set as the high-end Agena chips, except for the fourth core, that will be disabled. Other technical specifications for the tri-core chips are 2MB of shared L3 cache and 512KB per core of unshared L2 cache.
Surprisingly enough, AMD seems to have great plans of resuming processor shipments. Apart from the B2-stepping Toliman tri-cores, the chip manufacturer also plans to release one more B2 Opteron this month. The chip will be based on the Barcelona core and its most important feature will be its energy-efficiency. The above-mentioned CPUs are the last ones to be based on the B2 silicon stepping. Later next month, the chip manufacturer will introduce the third revision of the chip, that will come without the extremely hated TLB erratum.