AMD Announces Phenom II X4 and Promises Move to 32nm by 2011
Posted 11/13/08 at 12:30:04 PM | by Gordon Mah Ung
AMD will dub the 45nm die shrink of its consumer enthusiast CPU as Phenom II X4 and laid out plans for its first CPUs with integrated graphics core.
The Phenom II X4 is on tap for late this year and will follow the company’s smaller, faster 45nm Opteron chips. The new chip will feature 8MB of cache and support both DDR2 and DDR3 in the AM3 and AM2+ sockets. Phenom II X4 will be part of AMD’s “Dragon” platform that combines the new chip with DX10.1 graphics, the company’s new Stream GPU processing, OverDrive and Fusion for gaming utility.
The first PII X4 won't be available until early next year which drew questions of AMD's committment to power users. Company officials responded that AMD still cares about power users but it wasn't going to "wring its hands" over not having a competitor to Core i7 in time for Christmas. The company said that while power users are important, the company is more concerned with the main stream market where the lion's share of its profits come from. AMD didn't comment on performance but its expected to at least mirror the server-version of the chip. AMD said its 45nm server chip will offer 35 percent more performance than its existing chips with no additional power cost. Those chips are expected to ship in the 2.3GHz to 2.7GHz range.
AMD also announced plans for a 32nm family of chips as early as 2011. On the top end, a quad-core Orochi with 8MB of cache and DDR3 will hopefully keep enthusiasts happy. Orochi is part of AMD’s Bulldozer family that mysteriously disappeared from the company’s roadmap earlier this year. Until Orochi is available, the 45nm Phenom II X4, previously codenamed Deneb will hopefully fight off Intel’s Core i7 chips.
The move to 32nm will also see the Llano chip. The CPU will feature four cores, 4MB of cache, DDR3 and an integrated graphics core. AMD, meanwhile, confirmed it would be taking on Intel’s Atom chip with its Conesus CPU next year. Conesus will be dual-core, feature 1MB of cache and DDR2. In 2010, Conesus will give way to Geneva which doubles the cache to 2MB.
Updated with timing of Phenom II and performance questions.
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Release of AM3 Phenoms
Submitted by Fugazi on Fri, 2008-11-14 05:09
AM3 Phenoms will be released late this year, or is that only the new AM2+ Phenoms? The article says the PII's are on tap for late this year and early 09. Just want some clarifying, thanks.
-Andy
Submitted by gordonung on Fri, 2008-11-14 15:45
I'm looking for a way to answer this while balancing things I've been told that are still secret. I guess I can say
that you shouldn't really expect to have a 45nm Phenom under the Christmas tree or in front of the Yule log.
Submitted by Fugazi on Sun, 2008-11-16 22:21
It does appear that January looks fairly likely for the AM2+ 45nm Phenoms. I would like to see how improved the performance is, but unfortunately we have seen very little regarding its performance. I just ordered an asus m3a79-t, so thats what Im planning stick in it.
-Andy
Hey I think that AMD is
Submitted by Keith E. Whisman on Fri, 2008-11-14 01:45
Hey I think that AMD is heading back to the front of the class. If it doesn't outperform Intel it appears to me that it's going to be very close and offer some real competition against Intel. We win. Thank you Intel for not destroying AMD. But then again Intel is supposedly trying to figure out if AMD voided it's license to produce X86 processors with the split up. So I hope things work out there but man it sure does look good for AMD and us the consumers.
If the Phenom II X4 doesn't
Submitted by qa9b on Thu, 2008-11-13 14:49
If the Phenom II X4 doesn't show intel's offerings some competition, does AMD have the resources to move on/push ahead? Can they afford to have their enthuisast desktop offerings fail yet again? I've never been an AMD fan myself, but it's hard not to realize that AMD is the one fighting Intel's monopoly; forcing Intel to give more for less $$. Strangely, I find myself rooting for AMD on this one.
Submitted by Emotional Post-... on Thu, 2008-11-13 16:12
AMD isn't some underdog mom and pop shop. They have (and had) both the resources and the time to design a compelling product. They also have ATI's profits to call on.
Submitted by skhills on Thu, 2008-11-13 14:37
Interesting to see AMD adopting the naming convention that Intel just dropped (Core 2 Quad), because it was too confusing. I guess they need something to say "This isn't Barcelona," though, and they've put too much money into the Phenom brand to just dump it that soon.
Submitted by bcweir on Fri, 2008-11-14 20:50
... that AMD and Intel need each other to remain competitive and keep all that computing power within reach of us working folks!
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