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Although AMD’s focus has shifted to APUs, the company is not about to kill off its legendary Athlon brand anytime soon.

CPU World reports that AMD is planning to refresh the Athlon II X4 lineup with three Piledriver parts for the new socket FM2 platform, but we don’t have a launch date yet.

The Athlon II X4 730 is a 2.8GHz part with a 65W TDP, while the Athlon II X4 740 comes in clocked at 3.2GHz and features the same TDP. Both pack four Piledriver fours and 4MB of L2 cache.

The unlocked Athlon II X4 750K is also a quad-core, but it’s a 100W part clocked at 3.4GHz.

There is still no word on Turbo clocks, although it is very likely the new Athlons will feature Turbo Core technology. Also, no word on pricing yet, but since we are talking about Piledriver parts with no graphics, they should end up on the cheap side.

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The guys at Coolaler forums have got themselves an Engineering Sample of AMD’s Upcoming Piledriver FX-8300 series processor which features 8 Cores.

Still in ES phase, The FX-8300 series processor come within a boxed AMD packaging. The 2nd generation FX Vishera processors feature the Piledriver 32nm Architecture which delivers upto 10-15% IPC improvement over FX-Bulldozer.

The FX-Piledriver processor tested featured 124W TDP, 8MB of L3 Cache and core clock of 3.3-3.9GHz (Stock/Turbo Core). The processor was tested on an AM3+ socket motherboard (ASUS Crosshair V Formula) since Piledriver is compatible with 990FX chipset.

Benchmark results are posted below:

3DMark Vantage (CPU-Only):

    FX-8300 Piledriver @Stock – 18705 CPU Marks

3DMark 06 (CPU-Only):

    FX-8300 Piledriver @Stock – 4986 CPU Marks

AIDA64 Cache and Memory Benchmark:

    FX-8300 Piledriver @4.8GHz – 17410/11769/21472 MB/s (Read/Write/Copy)

Winrar Compression:

    FX-8300 Piledriver @Stock – 5946 KB/s

CineBench R11.5:

    FX-8300 Piledriver @Stock – 5.73

Expect the launch of Piledriver in Q4 2012

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Fusing CPUs and GPUs

The Piledriver cores are making their first appearance in the FirePro A300 series of ceepie-geepies that are a derivative of the "Trinity" family of desktop and workstation accelerated processing units, or APUs in AMDspeak.

Here's the thing. If your GPU is on the same die as the CPU, then it really doesn't matter if your machine supports PCI-Express 3.0 peripheral slots or not. That's the whole point of Fusion APUs for desktops and laptops and now FirePro APUs for workstations. Of course, you can't cram a top-end multicore processor and a full-on GPU into a single socket, so APUs are not for everyone.

AMD is putting out two FirePro A300 series APUs for workstations. The top-end part is the FirePro A320, which has a thermal design point of 100 watts and which has four Piledriver cores that run at 3.8GHz with a Turbo Core speed of 4.2GHz; they have 4MB of shared L2 cache memory. The GPU side of the chip has 384 Stream processors running at 800MHz. That GPU is rated at 184 gigaflops DP and 736 gigaflops SP.

The FirePro A300 also has four Piledriver cores, which run at 3.4GHz with a Turbo Core boost to 4GHz. The 384 Stream processors in the GPU portion of the chip run at a slower 760MHz, and the combined APU has a thermal rating of 65 watts. The GPU on the FirePro A300 is rated at 173 gigaflops DP and 693 gigaflops SP.

For either FirePro APU, you can allocate up to 4GB of main memory on the system to be used as graphics memory or a frame buffer for video, and you can run DDR3 memory as fast as 1.87GHz. The FirePro A320 has its CPU and GPU clocks unlocked, but the A300's are battened down so you can't overclock them.

Both FirePro APUs can drive as many as three displays, and they are aimed at 2D and entry 3D workstation users. Microsoft's Windows XP and Windows 7 operating systems can run atop these APUs, and so can SUSE Linux's Enterprise Desktop 11 and Canonical's Ubuntu Desktop 11.04 and 11.10 releases.

AMD did not announce pricing on these FirePro APUs, since they only go through the channel, but said that workstation partners would get these Trinity derivatives into the field beginning this month. These chips are aimed squarely at Intel's quad-core "Ivy Bridge" Xeon E3-1200 v2 processors, which sport internal HD Graphics P4000 GPUs. ®

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This week AMD launched first Accelerated Processing Units (APU), aimed at entry-level graphics workstations. Built on the latest AMD "Piledriver" microarchitecture, new FirePro A300 and A320 products integrate Graphics Processing Unit, which is capable to power CAD, modeling, and media and entertainment applications. The A300-series APUs can be used along with standalone FirePro graphics cards to improve GPGPU performance of non-graphics applications. The APUs work with AMD Catalyst Pro software, and they are certified to work with variety of professional programs. The FirePro A300-series microprocessors will be available in OEM systems in August 2012. Prices of A300 and A320 APUs were not disclosed by the company.

The introduction of new workstation chips was unexpected, however they are not completely new. The A300 and A320 APUs are exact clones of A10-5700 and A10-5800K desktop parts, and they come with identical features. A300-series "Trinity" APUs include 4 CPU cores, 4 MB L2 cache, a DDR3 memory controller and a graphics unit. The A300 runs at 3.4 GHz, and can operate up to 4 GHz when half of the cores are idle. The A320 is clocked at 3.8 GHz, and up to 4.2 GHz. Like the A10-A5800K, AMD A320 has unlocked clock multiplier. Integrated memory controller on new models supports DDR3-1866 memory. On-chip GPU has 384 stream cores, and runs at 760 MHz on the A300, and at 800 MHz on the A320 APUs. The FirePro processors can use both CPU and GPU portions of the chip for highly-threaded calculations. Theoretical single precision performance of the A300 and A320 products is 693 GFLOPs and 736 GFLOPs, and double precision performance is 173 GFLOPs and 184 GFLOPs respectively. The FirePro accelerated units are compatible with socket FM2. Just released chips are not the first Piledriver desktop products, as AMD already launched non-"K" A8 and A10-Series parts in OEM systems more than a month ago.

Quote (NewKID @ Aug 13 2012 01:49am)

end of the year

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AMD Trinity Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) for desktop socket FM2 are expected to be made available to retail on 1st October according to a rumour/report published on Japanese website Hermitage Akihabara. The website has pictures of the APUs and a feature and information chart of the APU key specifications. All these 32nm A-series APUs feature the “Piledriver” CPU architecture and integrated Radeon HD7000 series graphics.

    A6-5400K
    (2 cores / 3.6GHz/turbo 3.8GHz/1MB L2/TDP 65W/HD 7540D graphics/OPN AD540KOKA23HJ)
    A8-5500
    (4 cores / 3.2GHz/ turbo 3.7GHz/4MB L2/TDP 65W/HD 7560D graphics /OPN AD5500OKA44HJ)
    A8-5600K
    (4 cores / 3.6GHz/ turbo 3.9GHz/4MB L2/TDP 100W/HD 7560D graphics /OPN AD560KWOA44HJ)
    A10-5700
    (4 cores / 3.4GHz/ turbo 4.0GHz/4MB L2/TDP 65W/HD 7660D graphics /OPN AD5700OKA44HJ)
    A10-5800K
    (4 cores / 3.8GHz/ turbo 4.2GHz/4MB L2/TDP 100W/HD 7660D graphics /OPN AD580KWOA44HJ)

Enthusiasts have been waiting for quite a long time to get their hands on desktop Trinity APUs. The mobile Trinity chips were launched in May, meanwhile desktop Trinity APUs announced in June have only trickled onto the market built into machines made by OEMs like HP and ASUS. Architectural improvements within the new Trinity APU are supposed to produce a 25 to 50 per cent performance boost over their Llano predecessors.

Japanese tech website Hermitage Akihabara managed to photograph five of the A-series 5000-family APUs revealing the OPN codes, showing the processors to be “production ready”. The APUs are shown to be in the FM2 socket format. The chart above shows the base frequency and the Turbo Core frequency alongside other useful info such as L2 cache, number of cores, TDP and Radeon graphics chip. An article about the launch rumour published on CPU-World says the APUs in the above chart with the “K” suffix are supplied multiplier unlocked.

Only this single source features the rumoured release date of 1st October whereas other CPU focused websites estimated a late October launch for the new range of AMD Trinity desktop APUs.

Quote (dolarsignzeroxeighty @ Aug 15 2012 12:37am)

http://hexus.net/tech/news/cpu/43697-amd-launch-trinity-desktop-apus-1st-october/


bolded is something that i think l4d is interested to know.

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Advanced Micro Devices has released processor product data sheet documents covering specifications of low-cost AMD Athlon II and AMD Sempron central processing units (CPUs) that belong to family 15h better known as Trinity. The new low-cost chips will support all the capabilities of the more advanced brethren, will have two or four cores and will lack integrated graphics processing units.

Just like the rest AMD family 15h "Trinity" microprocessors, the new AMD Athlon II X2/X4 as well as Sempron X2/X4 chips will support main architectural features of the Piledriver architecture, including support for new instructions like SSE4.1, SSE4.2, AES, FMA, FMA4, AVX, AVX 1.1, BMI and others. The chips will use the same module Piledriver architecture with two 128-bit FPUs as well as level-two cache shared between each two cores (or one module), advanced power management, integrated dual-channel DDR3 memory controller, PCI Express 2.0 x16 controller and so on, reports CPUWorld web-site.

AMD Athlon II X2 and X4 family 15h microprocessors will have one or two Piledriver modules (two or four x86 cores), 2MB of L2 cache per module (4MB per chip), dual-channel DDR3 memory controller with official support for up to 1866MHz clock-speeds for memory and will also support Turbo Core 3.0 dynamic acceleration technology. The central processing units will not be too different from the A-series accelerated processing units when it comes to x86 performance, but since it will not have integrated AMD Radeon graphics core, it will not be able to take advantage of GPU compute technologies that are gaining importance.

AMD Sempron family 15h central processing units will also will have one or two Piledriver modules (two or four x86 cores), 1MB of L2 cache per module (2MB per chip), dual-channel DDR3 memory controller with official support for up to 1600MHz clock-speeds for memory. Given the lack of integrated GPU, Sempron will also not be able to take advantage of heterogeneous computing.

It remains to be seen how successful will AMD Athlon II and Sempron microprocessors for FM2 infrastructure be. It is not a secret that AMD ran into several issues with availability of FM1 motherboards particularly in the channel. In case the situation repeats itself with the FM2, the inexpensive microprocessors will suffer the most as the supply chain in general is more interested in moving more expensive Fusion A-series. Moreover, in case the tough economic situation persists, low-end platforms without integrated graphics solutions will simply be obsolete as discrete graphics cards are simply too expensive for low-cost PCs.

Quote (dolarsignzeroxeighty @ Jul 29 2012 03:12pm)

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-investors-sell-stock-rating,16430.html

mostly tells that if amd fails piledriver, they're out of the cpu buisness , not really impressed by this, it should stimulate them to work good.

http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/28096-amd-working-on-socket-fm2-athlons
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my bad for not checking my google alerts email for a couple of days.