The lackluster launch of Barcelona earlier this year left us with ambivalent feeling before the launch of Phenom. Up before the launch, numerous rumors of various problems were circulating, and when the launch finally happened and we only had two models to play with, we couldn’t help feeling a bit let down. The performance was good and lived up to what AMD had promised, more or less, but since the frequencies were so low and IPC was more or less the same as Core 2, it was still being outperformed by Intel’s processors. With the recent unveiling of the TLB bug, the crippling BIOS fix and the seized shipments of quad-core processors, the plans for the future has had to be revised.
The earlier announced tri-core series is set for arrival in February 2008, and should be available in decent numbers the following month. Two models are currently planned for launch, Phenom 8700 and Phenom 8600 running at 2.4 and 2.3 Ghz respectively. These are disabled quad-core with 512KB L2 cache per core and a shared 2MB L3 cache, not suffering from the TLB errata (B3 stepping).
The new B3 stepping Phenoms are expected to arrive in large numbers in March as well. With the “new” Phenom 9700 model, there will also be a respin of the Phenom 9600 and 9500 models, called 9650 and 9550. Frequencies will remains the same, just less errata. There will also be a Phenom 9900 model in Q2, which together with the 9700 model will use the full HyperTransport 3.0 bandwidth of 4 GHz. Later in 2008, AMD will announce more Phenoms.
Phenom 9600 Black Edition is expected before the end of the year. It runs at the same 2.3 GHz as the regular Phenom 9600, but comes with an unlocked multiplier. The Phenom FX processors have been put on hold, but are not canceled per se, we just won’t see them until AMD get their regular stuff working right.
With so few new processors based on the K10 architecture, AMD has had to turn to its K8 architecture once again to fill the large void that has appeared. AMD will sequentially move all of its current 90nm models to the 65nm manufacturing process, and refine frequencies somewhat. An extra 100 MHz will be added to some models, but at the same time cache will be cut in half. Since AMD isn’t able to make enough 65nm Brisbane capable of +3.0GHz frequencies, the 6000+ and 6400+ models will be phased out.
AMD will once again revise its Energy Efficient lineup, including the name. Athlon 4850e (2.5GHz), Athlon 4450e (2.3Ghz), and Athlon 4050e (2.1GHz) are expected to replace the current BE-2xxx models in Q1 2008.
Late, very late, 2008 we might see the first 45nm processors from AMD. These will basically be quad-core Phenoms with a lower TDP, slightly higher frequencies and hopefully bug-free design.
