Some details of AMD Piledriver CPUs

This fall AMD will release large number of new desktop processors, built on the latest Piledriver microarchitecture. With the exception of a couple of chips, details of upcoming lineup were known well ahead of the launch. Yesterday Expreview published a slide, titled "2012 Consumer Platform Quick Reference Guide for Desktops", that confirmed clock frequencies of upcoming "Piledriver" products, and shed some light on supported technologies.

The slide lists three high-performance FX processors with "Vishera" core: quad-core FX-4320, six-core FX-6300, and eight-core FX 8350. Details of FX-4320 and FX-8350 were known for quite some time. The CPUs run at 4 GHz, and Turbo Core technology can boost clock speed as high as 4.2 GHz when half of the cores are idle. The FX-6300 will operate at 3.5 GHz, and its maximum Turbo Core speed is 4.1 GHz. Quad- and six-core FX microprocessors will be rated at 95 Watt TDP, 30 Watt lower than the FX-8350.

Four Accelerated Processing Units, included on the slide, are quad-core A8-5500 and A10-5700, and dual-core A4-5300 and A6-5400. All of these are 65 Watt chips. We reported on A10, A8 and A6 APUs in the past, and the slide only confirms previously published specs. Less known from these 4 SKUs is A4-5300. This part has 2 cores, clocked at 3.4 GHz. The processor supports Turbo Core, which can raise the speed by another 300 MHz. The A4-5300 comes with integrated Radeon HD7480 GPU, which has 128 shader cores. The A4-5300 is the only "Piledriver" based desktop processor, that will not support a number of AMD features, such as accelerated video conversion and playback, dual-graphics, and Eyefinity technology.

The slide states that all above mentioned Piledriver processors will be available in late Q3 2012. It's important to note that the guide does not show several "K" APUs, that will be released at the same time frame. The summary of details of forthcoming FX CPUs and A-Series APUs, referenced by the document, is provided below:

Model	Cores	Frequency	Turbo Frequency	L2 cache	L3 cache	Socket Type	TDP
A10-5700	4	3.4 GHz	4 GHz	4 MB	N/A	Socket FM2	65 Watt
A4-5300	2	3.4 GHz	3.7 GHz	1 MB	N/A	Socket FM2	65 Watt
A6-5400K	2	3.6 GHz	3.8 GHz	1 MB	N/A	Socket FM2	65 Watt
A8-5500	4	3.2 GHz	3.7 GHz	4 MB	N/A	Socket FM2	65 Watt
FX-4320	4	4 GHz	4.2 GHz	4 MB	4 MB	Socket AM3+	95 Watt
FX-6300	6	3.5 GHz	4.1 GHz	6 MB	8 MB	Socket AM3+	95 Watt
FX-8350	8	4 GHz	4.2 GHz	8 MB	8 MB	Socket AM3+	125 Watt