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In a straight talk, AMD confirmed that the pricing for FX series is going to be extremely aggressive, with their king of the hill processor, the FX-8130P coming with a street price of $320. While AMD does not want to detail the clock speeds, FX-8130P was supposed to come with a 3.8GHz core clock and Turbo 2.0 mode at 4.2GHz in 105W ACP / 130W TDP power envelope.
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The company is targeting Back-to-School shopping period for the actual product launch, which will complete the two already available parts of the Scorpios platform: 900-Series chipset (or 9-Series, as AMD likes to call it) and Radeon HD 6000 Series of graphics cards.
According to AMD, the company decided to focus on gamers back with Phenom II launch, which was an overclocking hit among the enthusiasts, as well as popular core-unlocking feature, which was frowned internally but AMD did not "punish" any partners unlike moves we saw from competitors in the past. And to learn from AMD's own mistakes from the past, naturally.
While the silicon team is working hard on determining the shipping clocks of the FX processors, AMD's software team is "working heavily to help utilize eight cores in all applications, as well as games. We're working with partners to help leverage those capabilities."
All in all, we can say that AMD plans to return themselves to 20+ percent processor market share and offer the best value for gamers. As we all know, strong competition is key to having decent prices on the market (does anyone remember the time when a single GPU cart was selling for $500?). Only time will tell did AMD got this one right.
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PLUS.....
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For those that may be a little confused, these are the boxes for the two variants of Zambezi, both a quadcore and an octocore with the octocore being an unlocked processor. Zambezi will actually have three variants:
Quad-Core - 4 CPU Cores, 4MB L3 cache
Sexa-Core - 6 CPU Cores, 8MB L3 cache
Octo-Core - 8 CPU Cores, 8MB L3 cache
The Sexa-Core processors are based of Octo-Core Zambezi die with disabled CPU cores (dies that failed in QA testing, for instance). If Quad-Core processors turn out to be unlockable to a full Octo-Core configuration, such as certain processors in the past (dual-core to a quad-core, dual-core to a sexa-core) - AMD could reignite its market share among enthusiasts and gamers
