AMD Kind of Revives the Desktop FX Processors
09.25.07 - 10:14pm
Not so long ago AMD was living the goodlife with the performance crown firmly in it’s green hands. AMD’s FX line of processors, the pinnacle of overclocking performance, were fetching a hefty price in the $1000/processor range and all the top benchers of the world were churning through this chips like the world was ending. This all promptly ended when Core 2 was unleashed and swiftly kicked the Athlon 64 in the nuts and called it a day. For the last 9 months or longer AMD hasn’t had a flagship processor, the old FX-62 is practically being given away at $169 (used to sell for $900+) and their FX-7x chips failed to raise interest in the overclocking community. Now with their K10 architecture just releasing and a ton of hype over a new product launching AMD decides to “unleash” a “monster” on us.
Nice advertising huh? I along with a lot of other individuals were really hoping that AMD was going to unleash a beast. Say an early Phenom launch? How about a new 4×4 chipset or even the launch of the new AMD desktop chipset? How about even a formal announcement of the 2900 Pro? Nope, we get a re-spin of old technology to hold us over. Considering how this chip launches in between the void that sits between the Barcelona and Phenom launch I imagine AMD has great hopes in this chip being a stop-gap for what I could only describe as dreadful desktop performance. Launch a performance/price and performance/watt K8 and hope people will pay the extra money down the road to drop a K10 into that same socket. Either way this chip is months too late, the enthusiast market is dominated by Intel’s Core 2 Quad and frankly there is nothing exciting about K10 judging from the 2GHz and 2.5GHz benchmarks we’ve seen. This reminds me of the demise of Netburst, Intel road that train forever and even after the launch of it’s next major architecture it still tried to sell off dreadful chips. This chip comes equipped with 1MB of L2 cache, a 2.6GHz stock speed, completely unlocked multiplier, and a 65w TDP all built on AMD’s 65nm process. If you are somehow interested in this Black Edition 5000+ then it’ll set you back roughly $135 and you get the chip and a pretty box, no heatsink. I imagine these chips will be available sooner rather than later.
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