Wednesday, October 26, 2011

What comes after FX? FX Next

After not so successful launch of their new flagship desktop processor,AMD started talking up their next chip that will succeed Bulldozer Ver1. Say hello to FX Next ,based on Piledriver core :







Piledriver is supposed to fix certain shortcomings in BDver1 processors. I summed up some of them in my previous blog so I won't reiterate those.
What will AMD have to offer before Piledriver arrives? The following roadmap gives us some clues:

FX8170 is supposedly launching in Q1 2012. It will be based on new (somewhat improved) B3 stepping. Hopefully B3 will be enough to polish speed path issues (if there are any) and bring up clock speed. The rumored 8170 is supposed to run at 3.9/4.2/4.5Ghz clocks. This is a very solid uplift(~7.7% over 8150). Bad news is that there is no "8190" on the current roadmaps and 8170 is supposed to tide AMD over until PD arrives in Q3. That is 2 quarters... Good news is that PD will be overall 10-15% faster than what AMD has at the moment of its introduction (so 8170). This lines up well with rumored ~5% IPC increase over BD with the rest being clock speed.
So:
Q1-Q2 2012: 3.9/4.2/4.5Ghz FX8170
Q3-onward : 4.2?/4.5?/4.8?Ghz FX8280?
Effectively 4.2/3.9=1.07 or 7% clock uplift with PD. Now count in the IPC uplift of 5% or so : 1.07x1.05=1.12 or 12% overall faster than 8170. AMD said 10-15% more x86 performance with PD so this slides right in the middle of this projected figure. How much is this faster than current 8150? 8170 should be around 7% faster than 8150 so 4.2Ghz(base) PD based FX is going to be roughly 20% or so faster than 8150. Not a bad upgrade if you look at it from time perspective : 8 months after BDver1 we will get 20% faster FX part (stock vs stock). It's not unreasonable to expect better OC and thermal characteristics too,so all in all it will be a good "fix" for current BD desktop competitive situation.

PS All info above is my interpretation of available data. I used "best case scenario" above. Real PD core and 8170 may turn out to be totally different than what I speculated. We have seen this happen with BD core. Since back then I also based my predictions on publicly available data coming from AMD(which turned out to be a bit optimistic on their side) , this may happen again with PD and 8170. So take it as it is,just speculation.

1 comment:

  1. Thank you for this great information, you write very well which i like very much. I am really impressed by your post. Performance chips

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