AMD FX processors to launch on October 12

This quarter AMD is going to launch server-class "Interlagos" and consumer-class "Zambezi" processors, based on new Bulldozer micro-architecture. In the past two weeks three "Zambezi" FX-Series CPUs surfaced for pre-order at a few online US stores, suggesting imminent release of these models. Yesterday Donanimhaber reported that AMD FX-Series family will launch on October 12. There were also rumors that the family will be introduced in the middle of October, presumably on October 13. Coincidentally, AMD FX giveaway 2 ends on October 12, therefore it does look that something may happen on October 12 or 13. According to Donanimhaber, prices of the first three FX-Series chips will be from $175 for FX-6100 and up to $245 for FX-8150. The price of FX-8120 model will be $205. It's not clear from the translation whether these are going to be approximate retail prices, or official prices for OEM processors in 1K quantities. Our previous estimates were $155 - $170 for FX-6100, $185 - $200 for FX-8120, and $230 - $245 for FX-8150, i.e. they were slightly lower than the prices revealed by Donanimhaber. Judging by the prices, FX-Series CPUs will be positioned against Intel Core i5 and i7 offerings. Specifically, eight-core AMD FX-8150 fits between Core i5-2500K and Core i7-2600K. AMD FX-8120, also with 8 cores, will compete against Core i5-2500K, and six-core AMD FX-6100 is positioned against Core i5-2310. We can expect that multi-threading performance of AMD FX CPUs will either match, or exceed performance of similarly priced Intel Core i5s and Core i7s. At the same time, per-thread or per-core performance of AMD processors is expected to be noticeably lower than performance on Intel counterparts.

Please see the table below for specifications of new FX-Series processors:

Model	Cores	Threads	Frequency	Turbo Frequency	L3 cache	TDP	Price
FX-Series FX-6100	6	6	3.3 GHz	3.9 GHz	8 MB	95 Watt	$175
FX-Series FX-8120	8	8	3.1 GHz	4 GHz	8 MB	125	$205
FX-Series FX-8150	8	8	3.6 GHz	4.2 GHz	8 MB	125 Watt	$245