Posted on Monday, July 09 2012 @ 21:56 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
VR Zone
reports AMD's Piledriver FX and Opteron lines will receive a refresh by late summer or early fall:
Any reason to wait? Well, there are two expected main benefits: one is the supposedly improved instructions per-clock efficiency, which could be up to 15% based on the more optimistic figures, and the other one is the higher clock frequency, up to some 20% vs similar Bulldozer cores especially on the Opterons. Finally, yes, Haswell-compatible FMA3 fused multiply add format. And, oh yes, further improved power management. Note that there will be no new sockets (meaning AM3+ and G34/C32 still), everything has to fit within the current TDP, memory and I/O bandwidth limits. No support for PCI Express 3.0 either...
Now, how would it impact the competitive positioning? Not much as of now - 22nm Ivy Bridge-E / EP updates (more on that this week) to Core i7 and Xeon E5 lines will keep the performance chasm as it is today.
