Details of AMD A6-5400K and FX-8350 processors

In February Donanimhaber leaked AMD roadmap, that so far has been very accurate. The roadmap's second quarter included new A8-Series and A10-Series "Trinity" processors, as well as E1-1200 and E2-1800 APUs from Brazos 2.0 platform, all of which were either announced or launched in June. Based on the roadmap, planned new SKUs for the third quarter are A4-5300 and A6-5400K Accelerated Processing Units, as well as FX-8350, FX-8320, FX-6300 and FX-4320 high-performance chips. The roadmap slide doesn't have detailed specifications of unreleased chips, but many details of the A6-5400K and FX-8350 SKUs were recently disclosed by Fudzilla.

When launched, FX-Series 8350 is going to be the flagship AMD processor. This model utilizes enhanced Bulldozer microarchitecture, codenamed Piledriver, and incorporates 8 CPU cores and 16 MB cache, including 8 MB L2 and 8 MB of L3 caches. The FX processor is clocked at 4 GHz, or about 11% higher than the best consumer AMD CPU at this moment, FX-8150. Overall, performance of the 8300 could be even greater than 11% in multi-threading applications due to improvements in the Piledriver architecture. Both FX-8350 and FX-8150 have maximum Turbo Core frequency of 4.2 GHz, therefore the performance difference in single-threaded tasks won't be as big, however even in these tasks the upcoming chip should be slightly ahead of the FX-8150. Like the current generation of FX microprocessors, the 8350 supports DDR3-1866 memory, has unlocked clock multiplier, and does not integrate graphics unit. The processor has 125 Watt TDP, and works in socket AM3+ motherboards. According to Fudzilla, FX-Series 8350 will start sampling in August 2012. The processor will be launched in late October, which means that it was delayed by at least a month.

The second processor, that was detailed by Fudzilla, is a budget to mid-class A6-5400K APU. This SKU will be also built on Piledriver microarchitecture, however it has only 2 CPU cores, smaller L2 cache, and it lacks L3 cache. The A6 APU comes with 3.6 GHz base frequency, and Turbo Core technology may boost it by another 200 MHz. The A6-5400K integrates HD7540 graphics unit with 192 shader units, clocked at 760 MHz. Other noteworthy processor features are unlocked multiplier, support for DDR3-1866 memory, 65 Watt TDP, and socket FM2 compatibility. The APU will be released in early third quarter.