14 DAY TRIAL // We didn't quite expect the same product store, BTL, to grace us with information so soon after exposing the prices of the Trinity APU series, but we aren't about to complain either.
What the online store has for us is the pre-order price list for the AMD FX-8350, FX8320, FX-6300 and FX-4300 central processing units.
Codenamed “Vishera”, they are the successors to the Bulldozer and will, hopefully, leave a better impression than them.
We'll say it right off the bat, in case people never got around to finding out, that Vishera aren't supposed to match Intel's Core i7 “Ivy Bridge” microprocessors.
Instead, they were conceived as foils to the Core i5 line, the so-called “mainstream” range from the blue giant.
On that note, the Piledriver-based units actually have higher prices than their Core i5 counterparts, suggesting that AMD expects them to be better.
The AMD FX-4300 has four cores, 4 MB of L2 cache memory, 8 MB of L3 cache memory, a thermal design power (TDP) of 95W and clock speeds of 3.8 GHz base, 4.0 GHz Turbo Core. The price is of $131 / 100-131 Euro.
FX-6300 is a six-core unit with 6 MB L2 cache, 8 MB L3 cache, 3.5 GHz / 4.1 GHz clocks, a TDP of 95W and a price of $175 / 135-175 Euro.
FX-8320 is an 8-core with 3.5 GHz / 4.0 GHz clocks, 8MB L2 + 8 MB L3 cache, a TDP of 125W and a price of $242 / 186-242 Euro.
Finally, the AMD FX-8350, also an 8-core with 16 MB cache, runs at 4.0 GHz / 4.2 GHz, has a TDP of 125W and a price of $253 / 195 Euro.
All four Vishera Piledriver processors achieve the dynamic clock boosts thanks to Turbo Core 3.0 technology. They also get dual-channel DDR3 support and a new resonant clock mesh technology from Cylos Semiconductor (cuts power use by 10% or improves performance by 10% over bulldozer, without extra TDP).
Motherboards based on the Scorpius platform and the AM3+ infrastructure should sell sooner than the CPUs themselves, whenever that is. We just hope that the prices fall a bit until then, since it's strange that the FX-8150 is priced at $55 / 42-55 Euro less than the FX-8350, and $45 / 35-45 Euro less than the FX-8320, which is just 5-10% better than it.