AMD pwns Day 1

AMD IS FIRING all of its guns on a single day it seems – maybe they didn’t have money to stay at CeBIT for the course of the tradeshow, these days you never know.

First of all, they’ve demoed the 45nm Quad core Shanghai and Deneb CPUs, proving once and for all they’re still in the game ('which game?' I hear you ask...). The new-new AMD roadmappery puts Deneb and Propus cores (the first 45nm process cores) in late 2008, and slightly overlapping early 2009. Deneb FX (the “extreme” AMD CPU) is listed as 2009, together with the new AM3-packaged Deneb (which will remain L3-less).

Heka (tri-core, shared L3, AM3, DDR2 or DDR3) and Regor (dual-core, shared L3, AM3, DDR2 or DDR3) are also scheduled for 2009. A lot can be read into this (for example, the DDR3 memory controller is integrated into the core, but will only be available H2-2009), but we’ll write something quite unique on the matter soon.

Secondly, AMD has - quite uninspiringly - announced the launch of the 8.3 Catalysts. 3, 'cos the month is March, as you know. So for AMD, March officially begins on the 5th. The new driver is the first official support for QuadFire - or CrossFireX as it is known among the Miscreants of Markham. You can pick up the new driver here, come midnight. Just don’t DDOS the poor thing...

The third salvo came in the form of the 9100e and 4850e CPU launches. Branded as AMD Phenom and AMD Athlon, respectively, the first is the 65nm Agena Phenom core (1.8GHz/core, 2MB L2, 2MB L3, 65W TDP), the second is a dual-core (2.5GHz, 1MB L2, 45W TDP) that should make the delight of HTPCers around the world thanks to their power efficient design. These CPUs are also expected to be dirt cheap (€100/€50), according to our sources.

As AMD does not stop firing until the enemy, err, hacks have fallen to carpal tunnel syndrome - the new 780G chipset was also officially launched. These include the much-anticipated Hybrid Crossfire feature when using the 780G’s integrated HD 3200 chip with a discrete ATI 3000 series display adapter, combined through the QuadFire driver.

This seems like a lot, and it is. AMD has been pretty hush-hush about plans for 2008-2009 with but a few leaks about this and that coming to public. Now we have a clear picture of what AMD is up to. Let the chips fall where they may, eh AMD? µ