AMD 890GX to land in March

880G and CPUs coming in Q2

IT SEEMS LIKE there has been some confusion as to AMD’s naming convention of its chipsets and what we thought was the 890G is actually the 890GX. There will also be an 880G model, but that is expected to launch a month or two after the 890GX, which is set to arrive the first week in March.

We already know that the 890GX isn’t going to set the world on fire, but it’s at least going to be a decent replacement for the 790GX. For some reason AMD has decided to launch the 890GX ahead of its other new chipset and upcoming six core CPUs. According to our source the 890GX should launch on the first of March, although we have yet to confirm this date.

AMD is also set to launch an upgrade to the 780G which is for obvious reason named the 880G and the 790FX replacement should also launch about the same time and it’s likely to be called the 890FX. We don’t have specifics on these chipset, but as all three models are likely to use the SB850 southbridge, we should see six SATA 6Gbps on all future AMD motherboards using these chipsets.

At the same time as these new chipsets launch, AMD should also have four new six core processors as well as a new quad core, although we’re hearing there might be more than one new quad core. One of the new six core CPUs is said to be a Black Edition. With an expected TDP of 140W the Black Edition is going to need some serious cooling for overclocking as well as better than average power regulation on the motherboard.

All the new Phenom II parts are said to have a Hyper Transport speed of 2.4GHz, 6MB of L3 cache and possibly 512kb of L2 cache per core. The TDP of the other models are said to be either 95W or 125W although various sources are reporting different numbers here. Considering that the Thuban core is meant to be a 45nm architecture we’d really hope that AMD can keep these CPUs at a 95W TDP.

More cores doesn’t make a better processor, at least not unless you can take advantage of the extra cores. There are a lot of different rumours as to what the clock speed for the new Phenom II X6 parts will be, but the expected base clock for the Black Edition seems to be somewhere between 2.8GHz and 3.2GHz which is a fairly big range for these kind of things. We’ll have to wait until some more solid information appear before we can make an educated guess on the performance of these new six core models, but AMD might just manage to steal away some of the limelight from Intel on heavily threaded applications that require “real” cores rather than Hyper Threaded ones.S|A

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