AMD "Piledriver" refresh of Zambezi - info, speculations, test, fans

[BeepBeep2]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...icroprocessors

are these confirmed B3 steppings? for FX-4170 and FX-6200

hmm maybe not

http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Bulldo...70FRW4KGU.html

any reviews yet?

I think AMD are just milking B2 with the pointless FX-4170 and FX-8140 releases. The extra 100 MHz won't be worth a single $ over the 8120. We'll never see a B3 stepping out of Bulldozer IMO between how hard it failed (if not in performance to some, performance per watt is dismal...), production capacity with APU/CPU balance and available wafer slots @ GloFo.

We can blame the manufacturing process all we want but it's been 6 months since retail production began for FX-8100 series, 9 months since AMD Llano retail production and apparently it has only improved 3%. To be honest, AMD and GloFo need about 10x that.

One reason I am reluctant to blame the manufacturing process is Llano's performance per watt. At a high vcore (1.4v+ stock vcore) it can still beat Phenom II performance per watt, memory bandwidth and performance per clock and include a GPU with significantly less package pins (not sure how they pulled that off!)... Bulldozer couldn't, at all.

I think it's right for AMD to skip a new stepping here and get the already reworked and finished Piledriver core on the market ASAP. I'm sure they already have early engineering samples of 8-core FX-8300 CPUs, and Trinity will probably ramp up retail production before the end of March.