AMD desktop roadmap leaked

"Phenom X3 - is anyone even buying these blasphemies? The Phenom X3s are the "failed" Phenom X4s, right? Is anyone even buying these weird 3-core "creations"? Yazovets, "

I have an 8750 on a Gigabyte 780G board. It outperforms X2 6000+ in many games and in encoding. They match lower end C2D's performance in their price range. For $129 at Newegg it's a steal.

They are no more crippled than when Intel would disable a core to create a single core CPU. Both AMD and Intel have done that for years, along with disabling cache for Semprons and Celerons.


I do not know how amd is still afloat. I can only hope it stays that way. 
So far it's stolen gfx crown, but also its be and le cpus are widely used in combination with mATX 780 mobos in media computers which are slowly becoming flavour of the year. Not to mention gpus like hd3650 with passive cooling. All in all, i think amd is on a good path to pc of tomorrow. And for the sake of us all and prices, i hope i'm right. Intel can afford to fail more often than amd

AMD in a way keeps Intel honest, so to speak. Without AMD, prices of Intel CPUs will almost certainly go up. The progress of new technology will also likely be slower.

In the past, Intel has done exactly that when AMD fell too far behind. Prices and technology advancements all but stagnated at one point. When the various flavours of Athlons came out, Intel was caught with its pants down and started to fight viciously for its market share.

Competition is a good thing for all of us. Buy AMD when you can, it doesn't always hurt that you haven't bought the fastest CPU available.

I think most people missed the point that these are based on the Denab Core, which is their 45nm parts. that makes it a whole different game, there is no telling how the 2.8ghz and 3.0ghz 45nm parts will perform, its entirely unfair to assume that these parts will perform on the same pace as the Agena 65nm parts. These things could very well be screamin demons.

The big thing the world needs to get over is comparing CPU to CPU and passing judgment based solely on that. we're well beyond the simpleminded CPU is king mentality. in order to truly compare products in this day and age, you must benchmark the entire platform, CPU, Chipset, RAM, Graphics Card and Hard Drives.

As seen with the Centrino 2 vs Turion x2 Ultra, the Intel CPU is faster pound for pound than AMD's, but when you benchmark the whole platform, AMD's Turion x2 Ultra is stomping the Centrino 2 in every category, by as much as 70%, especially in Graphics and HiDef video playback.

AMD made a choice a couple years ago to fore go the CPU speed race and take their fight to the entire platform level, and they are quite successful at it, most people, especially the AMD haters dont stop to look at that, they just compare CPU to CPU and declare Intel king... but if took the time to compare Phenom x4 + 790fx MB + top end RAM + ATI 4870 x2, you would find the results to be a little less in Intel's favor

still masturbate about some gaming fps, amd takes over the virtualization world because AMD has a feature, Intel has not - and won't for the next couple of month.
Nested paging.

"the gap in process technology is not really the 1 year that is publicized and measured arbitrarily by the start of a tech node ramp - it is more like 2+ years (when you consider the respective time when mature tech node performance is actually achieved). "

The truth it is is less than 6 months on average.
Intel has about 8 fabs and they convert 1 to 45nm. When it works good they roll out the technique to the others. It takes years to get there.

The majority of their processors still use 65nm today.

AMD has one major fab and it makes sense to do the transition a little slower to keep good yields and produce parts.

Rather people seem to be unware of the true competitive history of AMD. Pretty much most of the time, from the very beginning, AMD was making better yet cheaper processors than Intel
If you don't believe it - read "Imitation To Innovation: AMD's Best CPUs" article at 
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-cpu-history,2008.html

Found a previous comment rather telling - "It took AMD about 18 months to get there" when talking about the 65nm process.

This, my friends, is the oft overlooked "benefit" (or microsoft would probably use feature) of AMD's continuous transistor improvement (CTI).

The new node STARTS at where the previous node left off and is essentially a geometric shrink with somewhat lower voltage and then the process PERFORMANCE gradually starts to mature to final target. This is in stark contrast to Intel which puts all of the major performance improvements in up front at the start of the tech ramp.

The CTI approach has it's pros/cons - this does allow AMD to reap the economic benefits of the smaller features, but is very misleading when comparing performance to other competitors (mainly Intel) as the gap in process technology is not really the 1 year that is publicized and measured arbitrarily by the start of a tech node ramp - it is more like 2+ years (when you consider the respective time when mature tech node performance is actually achieved).

So what's the point? This is why you typically see AMD launch products at or below the speed of the previous generation - 45nm appears to be different though.... Though this may be a bit artificial as most had expected 65nm quad products to be hitting 2.8, 3.0Ghz by now. In fact I think AMD may have even been "dancing in the aisles" about that prospect sometime last year? 

Apply salt to wound:

INQ, May 2007: "So what do you end up with? A massive gain in frequency. How massive? Almost 500MHz. Instead of the much touted launch parts, look for five SKUs at launch, AM2 quads at 2.6GHz, 2.7GHz and 2.9GHz..."

"First they screw loyal customers with all the socket changes. Then all their small vendors with the Dell deal. Now they produce inferior kit and with no customer loyalty they go down the toilet."

intel might have kept the same socket but they changed the FSB 5 times. making older motherbords completely useless. AMD might have changed socket 3 times but its much clearer, if it fits it works.

their dell with intel (caused by intel change in pricing policie) unfortunatly came just at the wrong time. when their produciton was a minimum.
and they dont produce inferior kit. intel just made better stuff... for more money.

Or maybe AMD didn't fuse off the core as much as disable it at an instruction level? If thats the case its a failed X4 with all 4 cores running but only 3 actively working. I believe this makes more sense in light of the fact that the X4 is difficult to produce meaning there would be a fair amount of rejects.

Remember that AMD have had some practise with integrated memory controllers, and getting 4 cores on a chip, and... the Dark Mayor is baack!

Not likely... Not with phenoms at last. For instance by 3ghz wolfdale does 3800 with 1.15v under load and 4200mhz with 1.25v under load. The phenoms are at least 10% slower clock for clock compared to Core 2 and Intel has a lot of mfg headroom left @ 45nm to jack speeds if they needed, but they don't cause AMD's mfg is jacked and they aren't making their speed grades.

AMD roadmaps are leaked to Chile Hardware? Seems like a long way to go for a leak. AMD process tech at 65 nm is finally looking good. The latest Brisbane G2's are overclocking nicely. The 5050e looks interesting. It took AMD about 18 months to get there. Hopefully, it won't take that long to get 45 nm working well. If they can do it within the next year or so they will have a mature, well balanced platform. Intel have a great processor running on an obsolescent platform which needs expensive DDR3 to do its best and an all-new platform which requires DDR3 and could have teething problems. AMD is not quite out of the game yet. Now, where are the 790FX boards with the SB750 and a nice overclocking BIOS?

Can't wait now all we need is a new socket.

but isn't ChileHardware based in *Chile*, not Spain?

The X3s are not the failed X4s. They have similar TDPs. Makes more sense that they are the X4s that ran way too hot, otherwise the X3s should be pulling ~ 25% less watt.

If AMD can get the clock speeds of Phenoms into the mid 3 ghz range soon, you will see them take the performance crown away from Intel and their 2+2 Quads.

First they screw loyal customers with all the socket changes. Then all their small vendors with the Dell deal. Now they produce inferior kit and with no customer loyalty they go down the toilet. 

If they had remained loyal to customers I would have stayed with AMD. Their Machiavellian tactics have backfired.

I seriously doubt AMD can hit any significant quantity of 3.0ghz parts on 45nm at launch. I'm betting that they launch with a 2.8ghz top bin and it takes them until fall 2009 to get to 3.0. An immediate 20% speed bump from a new process change very difficult. Eventually, yes, but not at launch.

you dont have to be so mean to amd. a B3 3.0Ghz phenom x4 can drive any graphics card configuration with ease. Besides, the new phenoms will have about a 10% improvement in clock per clock performance making it equivalent to a 3.3 phenom now which is pretty darn fast. hopefully the overclocking is good. and yes, people do buy tri core phenoms. $102 gets you a 2.1 ghz x3 which is good for 2.7ghz easy. most stuff including games wont even use 3 cores, let alone 4.

People seem to forget that AMD have only ever had two "competitive" products - the Athlon and the Athlon 64. Everything else has always been a cheapo bargain bin alternative to Intel for specific applications. We are merely smoothing over the bump in the roadmap that was Athlon.

The poor Intel and anti AMD (but not aligned) fan boys are sure to spread their foul seed all over this one - as they have already done. 

It's amazing what the anonymity of the internet can do to boost one's flaming ego. Go home to your abused wives and stop trying to compensate on the Inq.

Totally unimpressive.

It appears AMD is on the last throes of their current process, tweaking it for all it's worth to get just a wee bit more performance.

They need to get their next process ramped up and jump over Intel in the power-speed race. Like say 5.0G in a 25W package?

Oh, heck, let's just admit it, silicon is not the best material for these chips. Time to move to something else.

And expected to be as BLAZING fast as the long-awaited Barcelona!

*lmao*

Even it they release it now I wouldn't be impressed.

In short, AMD will still not threaten Intel in 2009 in the desktop space. They will produce power hungry chips at similar frequencies that under-perform. 

The good news is that AMD will gain ground.

The Phenom X3s are the "failed" Phenom X4s, right? Is anyone even buying these weird 3-core "creations"?

These could be the processors previously reported as "4.0 and 4.4GHz" by another site. Those 4000 and 4400 numbers might be the (possibly doubled) HT speed instead.

Remember that the TDP is NOT the power draw! The fact that a CPU is labeled at 125W does NOT mean that it will draw 125W.

That distinction is very important.