14 DAY TRIAL // AMD is trying to rebound against the impressive Intel Conroe demo shown at IDF, with its 65 nanometre party in Prague next week. They will talk about the progress company is making with the production ramp of its Fab 36, but at the same time, the company will introduce its fastest clocked CPU. AMD is finally presenting a 3GHz part, breaking a "record" set by the infamous Athlon 64 FX-57, a 2.8GHz CPU released back in 2005.
The interesting part about this launch is the fact that we're not talking about a dual core component, but rather a single core part - the first introduced after FX-57 as well. The brand new Opteron 256 and 856 are built inside a 95W thermal envelope and feature 128KB of L1 and 1024KB of L2 cache, using the same old Socket 940. The launch date is set for April the 4th or April 6th.
The 290/890 is clocked at 2.8 GHz, and they come with two cores. Frontside bus is the same on all parts, two 16-bit HyperTransport links clocked at 1GHz each. Best thing about this dual-core part is that it's still using the very same thermal envelope in 3GHz CPU's - 95W.
The company has now a "commercial Stable Image Platform" program, which guarantees the availability of Opterons clocked at 2.4, 2.6 and 2.8 GHz throughout 2006 and most of 2007.