David Flynn19 November 2008, 12:00 PM
The second-gen Phenom X4 will arrive in fire-breathing gaming systems with speeds to 3GHz and up to 6MB of Level 3 cache.
MD hopes to kick-start its new line of 45nm processors with products for its most loyal markets: servers and gamers.
The former comes in the shape of Shanghai, the codename for its new Opteron 64 superslab, which builds upon the K10 ‘Barcelona’ architecture and took the spotlight this week at AMD’s media launch in Singapore.
But the one you’ll want to hear about is the Phenom II, previously known by the codename of Deneb and due to debut in the first quarter of next year.
The Phenom II will be derived from the same 45nm foundation as Shanghai and is expected to launch at speeds as high as 3.0GHz with up to 6MB of Level 3 cache. It’ll slot into AMD’s second-gen extreme gaming platform known as Dragon, which will combine the quad-core Phenom II X4 powerplant with an ATI Radeon HD 4000 graphics engine and AMD’s own 700 series chipset. Dragon is the successor to the current
Spider platform, which is built around the 65nm Phenom X4 and ATI Radeon HD 3800.
The challenge for AMD, of course, is going to be how Phenom II Dragon systems stack up against Intel’s own fire-breathing
Core i7 ‘Nehalem’ platform. Unless AMD can prove the Phenom II offers substantially more horsepower, its best chance of success will be to undercut Intel in a price war which neither company wants.
More mainstream desktop PCs fitting into AMD’s ‘Pisces’ platform will look towards cheaper Phenom variants such as the quad-core Propos chip, which is identical to Deneb but lacks Level 3 cache, and a
triple-core Phenom II X3.
The Phenom II line will rely on DDR2 memory at launch but will shift to DDR3 in 2010. The 45nm Phenom II core will also find its way into notebooks with a dual-core Caspian processor in 2009 and quad-core Champlain in 2010.
But the big change comes in 2011, when AMD intends to launch processors built around its new Fusion architecture. Fusion integrates the processor and graphics into a single package built on a 32nm process. The catch is that Fusion was due next year, so the revised 2011 delivery puts AMD well behind Intel, which released its own CPU+GPU package last month in Nehalem and plans to roll out 32nm processors from early 2010, with a switch to a 32nm microarchitecture (which will replace Nehalem) in 2011.
Interestingly, AMD’s roadmap earmarks the same quad-core Fusion processor (codenamed Llano) for mainstream desktops and notebooks. A dual-core chip dubbed Ontario will arrive as the third-gen
Yukon processor for ultraportable notebooks, but high-end performance desktops will eschew Fusion chips for a new Phenom-based Orochi powerplant which AMD promises will have more than four cores (we’re thinking six, as AMD has already announced a six-core Opteron 64 processor codenamed Istanbul for late 2009) and more than 6MB of Level 3 cache.
David Flynn visited Singapore as a guest of AMD.