AMD favours Socket F for 4x4 Athlon FXs?

Roadmap said to show trio of gamer-friendly CPUs on the way

By Tony Smith • Get more from this author

Posted in PC Builder, 22nd September 2006 12:02 GMT

AMD is set to launch three Athlon 64 FX processors for its upcoming 4x4 gaming platform, sources who claim to have seen the chip maker's roadmap claim. All three CPUs will use AMD's 1207-pin Socket F interconnect, they add.

According to a report in Dutch-language site Tweakers.net, AMD's trio of 4x4 FXs will ship as the FX-70, FX-72 and FX-74, clocked at 2.6GHz, 2.8GHz and 3.0GHz, respectively. They're all 90nm parts and consume up to 125W of power. Each has 2MB of L2 cache, with 1MB assigned to each processing core.

It's not clear when the chips will ship. According to the source, however, AMD will release faster 90nm Athlon 64 X2s in November, taking the family up to 3.0GHz with the 6000+. It will be accompanied by the 5400_+ and the 5600+, both clocked at 2.8GHz but with 1MB and 2MB of L2 cache, respectively. Both 5xxx chips have 98W TDPs, while the 6000+ is a 125W part. All three connect through Socket AM2 pin-outs.

The processor company has said it will push the 4x4 platform this coming Christmas in systems starting at well under $1,000, according to AMD executives.

AMD announced 4x4 in June this year. It's essentially a two-CPU motherboard rigged for ATI's CrossFire and Nvidia's SLI dual-GPU technology twice over to support four GPUs. Each CPU slot will hold a dual-core Athlon 64 FX processor, so that's four cores. Each chip gets 2GB of dedicated memory, for a total of 4GB. '4x4' is a codename, AMD insists. ®

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