14 DAY TRIAL // It appears that a certain central processing unit that Advanced Micro Devices unleashed not long ago is going to be the last newcomer people will see for a while, at least according to a leaked slide.
No doubt at least some part of the worldwide consumer base has heard about the new central processor from Advanced Micro Devices.
Dubbed Phenom II X4 980 Black Edition, it was designed with a core clock speed of 3.7 GHz and described as the fastest of its series to date.
Then came the reviews, which didn't have much favorable things to say about it, finding that it was beaten by not just current-generation Intel chips, but also Nehalem ones.
Given all this, some people might be asking themselves just what the Sunnyvale, California-based company has in mind for the future Phenom line.
Apparently, the answer to that is nothing, at least as far as the remainder of the ongoing year (2011) is concerned, although Fusion units will come to complete the VISION 2011 family.
A leaked slide shows that the Zambezi FX-Series and Llano A-Series accelerated processing units will finally arrive in June.
The Zambezi are the high-end models, being 32nm chips with four, six or eight cores and which will be fully detailed once they are officially unleashed.
For now, only the 8 MB of L3 cache and the TDP of up to 125W are known, not counting the integrated Radeon HD 6000 graphics capable of matching certain discrete solutions.
As for the Llano A-Series mainstream chips, they can boast up to four cores and also have their own built-in graphics (Radeon HD 6410, HD 6530 or HD 6550, with 160, 320 and 400 Stream Processors, respectively).
The mainstream chips have a TDP of 100W at most and, like their high-end counterparts, are designed on the 32nm manufacturing process technology.