More Deerhound electricals leak

YOU HAVE TO love companies that talk about their upcoming products in the context of other upcoming products they are really not supposed to talk about at all. In this case, it is a voltage regulator company talking about AMD's Deerhound.

Since they were nice enough to spill the beans, I won't tell you who they are, but there are a few juicy tidbits here and there. They confirm that they are thermally, electrically and socket compatible with the older parts, but that is old news. It is nice to see it in writing from someone other than AMD though.

Getting into a little harder data, we have a requirement for a 100A VRM, and it comes in two flavours, a solder-on and a plug-in edge card. Shades of early generation Xeons anyone? This to me is a good idea, especially in light of the HE/EE/SE and AM3 parts on the horizon. One board, pick you VRM for maximum efficiency.

Here's a pic:

One thing to think about is that if the older parts are 80A @ 1.3/1.35V giving them 105W +/- a little, then the new ones at 100A are only going to require just over 1V. Interesting if it holds up and there is not a big bump in wattage used.

The troubling bit is that it that they are aiming it for an end of Q3 release. This doesn't mean a slip per se, AMD might ship happily with other makes at first, but it adds to the chorus of later than AMD might want. We will know for sure in a few days, the analyst meeting will signal that pretty clearly. µ