The new ‘Zambezi’ processor

The production of the ‘Zambezi’ processor was delayed for some time and everybody was waiting to find out the cost of it and how well it can perform. It is going to unlock the eight core bulldozer central processing unit and is supposed to create a bench mark against the Sandy Bridge chips introduced by Intel. The primary reason behind the development of this Bulldozer architecture is to address different market segments of the PC market going head on against the Pentium and xeon.The cost of it

The FX Black Edition processor is going to cost $ 320 when it will reach the shelves during the next few months. As expected pricing for this series of AMD processors is going to be extremely aggressive and the company is actually targeting the Back-to-School shopping period for the actual launch of the product.

Focus

As per the AMD PR and the executive team, with the launch of this eight-core processor, the company has its focus on the gamers. Though AMD is still not ready to reveal the details about the clock speed, the ‘Zambezi’ is expected to come with a core clock of 3.8 GHz along with a turbo 2.0 modes in the 4.2 GHz variation. The software team of the company is working hard to utilize all the eight cores in every application as well as games also to make the processor fully functional for the users.

The Variants

Actually ‘Zambezi’ will have three variants with Quad-core, Sexa-core and Octo-core with 4 MB and 8 MB L3 cache. The Sexa-core processors are based on the Octo-core ‘Zambezi’ with disabled CPU cores and if the quad-core processors prove to be unlockable to a full octo-core configuration then in all probability AMD is going to put the market share on fire among the game enthusiasts.

Future

With the introduction of these series of processors, AMD tends to return back to the 20+ percent of the market share of the processor market and are expected to offer the best possible value for the gaming segment of the industry. As Bulldozer is paired with the DDR3-1600 memory by AMD, new memory bandwidth ranging between 25.6 and 51.2 GB/s is expected in near future. AMD is planning to expose a number of advanced memory options to the CPU design and should have no problem in running the DDR3-2000 or DDR3-2133 without over clocking the CPU. Only time can tell that if AMD has got this one right.