14 DAY TRIAL // It looks like Advanced Micro Devices is getting serious about their three core central processing unit design as some information is surfacing on the World Wide Web and they are starting to make waves even if the processors themselves will not arrive until the first quarter of the next year.
The processor manufacturing company even came up with a new name for the odd cored processing units that are aimed at filling the blank performance and price spot between the dual core and the quad core line of products. Toliman as they will be called, the three core processors will come in just two varieties and they are both scheduled to hit the market in March 2008.
The high end Toliman three core processor will arrive under the 7700 designation and it will run at a clock speed of 2.5GHz while sporting three 512KB of L2 cache memory and a shared L3 cache memory of 2MB. Its TDP will stay in the general vicinity of the 89 watts mark, so we may safely assume that it will be a fairly cool processing unit that will not need a huge cooling solution, while also being less power hungry than currently presented quad core processors.
A 7600 version of the Toliman three cored processing units will also come in the same general time frame and apart from the lower running clock frequency of 2.3Ghz, it will feature the very same traits as the higher end 7700 model.
Advanced Micro Devices is also expected to launch a Heka processing unit too that will also pack a three core design, but which unlike the Toliman (an Agena processor with one disabled core) will come as a new and totally reworked product. There are only a few pieces of information about the Heka class of processing units and it is clear that they will arrive with compatibility for the next AMD socket, the AM3, while being built around the 45 nanometer fabrication process.
The use of the 45nm process throws Heka in the first quarter of 2009 and it will most likely come in two versions, supporting both DDR2 and DDR3 random access memory modules. According to the news site vr-zone, the Heka line of central processing units may also be based on the quad core Deneb CPUs that will have one processing core disabled.