14 DAY TRIAL // With a bit less than a week to go until their official launch, AMD's FX-series processors based on the Bulldozer architecture have started popping around just about everywhere, the latest sighting coming from an Ukrainian retailer which has listed the AMD FX-8120.
According to the Overclockers Ukraine website, which has uncovered this CPU, the FX-8120 arrived in the retailer's warehouse on October 5, and the product has been listed ever since for 1791 UAH ($223.5 or 166 Euros).
For this much money, users will get a processor with four Bulldozer modules, for a total of eight processing cores which have a base clock of 3.1GHz as well as a 4GHz maximum Turbo.
The rest of the chip's features are identical with those of the higher performing FX-8150 that has been spotted in retail before and include 8MB of Level 3 cache, 8MB of L2 cache memory, and a dual-channel DDR3 controller supporting memory speeds up to 1866MHz.
What interesting to note however, is that the processor listed has a TDP of just 95W, which means that we are dealing with the energy-efficient version of the FX-8120 (AMD also plans a 125W SKU for this CPU).
AMD is expected to launch the FX-8120 in less than a week from now, on October 12, and this will be accompanied by the FX-8150 and the six-core FX-6100 processors.
In development since 2005, Bulldozer is AMD's next high-performance processor architecture, which is optimized to deliver better inter-core communications and a higher instructions per clock cycle count.
As a result, AMD used a modular approach, each dual-core module being comprised of 2MB of L2 cache, 16kB 4-way L1 data cache per core and a 2-way 64kB L1 instruction cache per module, two dedicated integer cores and two symmetrical 128-bit FMAC pipelines that can be unified into one large 256-bit wide unit.
