AMD Releases FX-6200 and FX-4170 Processors; FX-8120 Gets a Price Cut
by Ryan Smith on February 27, 2012 5:38 PM ESTAMD sent word this morning that they’re doing some shuffling of their Bulldozer based FX processor lineup. Altogether in the near future AMD will be releasing a new CPU, releasing a previously announced CPU, and doing a price drop on an existing CPU.
| CPU Specification Comparison | |||||||||
| Processor | Cores | Clock Speed | Max Turbo | NB Clock | L2 Cache | TDP | Price | ||
| AMD FX-8150 | 8 | 3.6GHz | 4.2GHz | 2.2GHz | 8MB | 125W | $249 | ||
| AMD FX-8120 | 8 | 3.1GHz | 4.0GHz | 2.2GHz | 8MB | 95W/125W | $199 | ||
| AMD FX-8100* | 8 | 2.8GHz | 3.7GHz | 2GHz | 8MB | 95W | N/A | ||
| AMD FX-6200 | 6 | 3.8GHz | 4.1GHz | N/A | 6MB | 125W | N/A | ||
| AMD FX-6100 | 6 | 3.3GHz | 3.9GHz | 2GHz | 6MB | 95W | $149 | ||
| AMD FX-4170 | 4 | 4.2GHz | 4.3GHz | 2.2GHz | 4MB | 125W | N/A | ||
| AMD FX-B4150* | 4 | 3.8GHz | 4GHz | 2.2GHz | 4MB | 95W | N/A | ||
| AMD FX-4100 | 4 | 3.6GHz | 3.8GHz | 2GHz | 4MB | 95W | $109 | ||
| AMD Phenom II X6 1100T | 6 | 3.2GHz | 3.6GHz | 2GHz | 3MB | 125W | $190 | ||
| AMD Phenom II X4 980 | 4 | 3.7GHz | N/A | 2GHz | 2MB | 125W | $170 | ||
First and foremost, the FX-4170 is finally being prepared for release. This is AMD’s top quad core (two module) part, and while it was announced at the Bulldozer launch back in October AMD had said they weren’t going to be releasing it until later in the year. Like the FX-4100 it’s a harvested Bulldozer CPU, and is the first Bulldozer quad core with a 125W TDP, owing to its high clockspeeds.
The second product today is AMD’s new CPU, the FX-6200. Like the FX-4170 was to quad cores, this is the first 125W TDP part for AMD’s hex core Bulldozers. At 3.8GHz base and 4.1GHz turbo it has a higher base clockspeed than any of AMD’s octo core parts, however turbo caps out just a bit lower than the FX-8150. AMD didn’t give us the Northbridge clockspeed, but it’s almost certainly 2.2GHz given the TDP and clockspeeds.
Finally, the FX-8120 is getting a price cut today. Unfortunately AMD sent along their generic all-regions press release today, so we were not given any pricing information on the FX-8120 or any of the other processors mentioned today. We will update this article as soon as we have confirmed pricing from AMD, but in the meantime we’d expect AMD to knock at least $10 off of the FX-8120, while the FX-6200 and FX-4170 should launch not too far above their existing lower-clocked counterparts at $149 and $109 respectively.
Meanwhile, AMD has told us that the release of the FX-6200 and FX-4170 will be staggered based on region with no further information, so all we know at the moment is that they won’t be available in the North American e-tail market today.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
23 Comments
View All Comments
chizow - Monday, February 27, 2012 - link
What's sad is the company that once proudly touted IPC and performance at lower clockspeeds over Intel during the Netbust era seems to have gone full 180 in the wrong direction.These Bulldozer chips clock up to 3.5-4GHz, great, but its like they're running in place. There's just no performance behind them despite the increases in clockspeeds.
Case in point, these 3.8-4GHz parts perform about the same as a stock clocked i7 920 (@2.66GHz) in the best light and are still slower than the much lower clocked CPUs in the worst case......
Operandi - Tuesday, February 28, 2012 - link
They touted their design at the time, any and all companies are going to do that.Its also pretty clear AMD didn’t want to have to rely on pure clock speed but they needed it to get to the somewhat competitive state they are in now, after a ton of delays. Bulldozer is not Netburst but clearly needs a lot of work, if they can get IPC improvements in on a regular basis they could turn things around.
Hopefully AMDs new cooperate strategy doesn’t mean they drop out of the enthusiast market altogether, but as long as they are going after the server market they should be some overlap with the high performance enthusiast market.
Flunk - Monday, February 27, 2012 - link
These still are not price competitive with Intel's Sandy Bridge chips. Since AMD seems dead set on not lowering their prices pricing the 8120 similarly to the i5-2500 that outperforms the highest performing bulldozer chip in 99% of applications is absurd.Since the biggest cost in processors is the development you would think that AMD would want to move more volume, but apparently they just want to stay uncompetitive. Buying an AMD desktop processor right now just doesn't make any sense. The llano notebooks on the other hand are a decent GPU-CPU combo at the right price.
It would be unfortunate if AMD dies because of poor marketing.
TiGr1982 - Monday, February 27, 2012 - link
I fully share your opinion. Previously I was an AMD fan, but, concerning the desktop, not anymore because of FX's lack of performance. But yesterday I was in computer store and I saw myself that people are actually buying AMD FX CPU's (together with FX990 MB's), so, surprisingly, in terms of sales things appear to be not so bad for AMD...tipoo - Tuesday, February 28, 2012 - link
That's one anecdote, but looking at their financial results its their A-series APU's that have kept them up, not the FX series. They really should focus on the former, and I think that's what they will do since they said they no longer want to (and lets face it, no longer can) compete with Intel on the high end.TiGr1982 - Tuesday, February 28, 2012 - link
Right, A-series APU (Llano, specifically) are nice for the price (unlike FX).In particular, just a few days ago I've bought a Llano-based laptop for my wife (15.6", A6-3420M, 8 GB DDR3 1333, HDD 750 GB) from ASUS. It is really fast enough for Web/Office/Skype, even for old games (say, 2006 and older). It is running very cool and quiet - almost silently most of the time. For its price of $500, I'd say, this is is a good deal, thanks to a relatively low Llano prices.
StormyKnight - Monday, February 27, 2012 - link
I have been an AMD fan since the advent of the K6-III 450. When the Athlon hit and gave Intel some competition I was stoked. When the first dual core Athlons hit, I built an Athlon X2 3800 box. That just died last Summer. I started buying components piece by piece waiting for Zambezi benchmarks and release dates. When I started seeing the numbers and the explanations, I started thinking, "Is this AMD's Willamette?" It sure started to look like the early P4s. I have since jumped ship and built my first Intel box using the i5-2500K. I have a safe overclock of 4.5332GHz. It performs wonderfully. Now I'll be keeping my eye on AMD just in case they produce an Intel-killer, but I won't be holding my breath. I truly wish AMD to stay in the market to keep CPU prices down because competition does just that.DocRussell - Monday, February 27, 2012 - link
I can't recall there ever being a CPU with a stock clock speed of 4ghz+...Like many I've been enjoying overclocks north of 4ghz since my first Wolfdale CPU, but if this is truly the first 4ghz+ stock CPU I need to give pause and congratulate AMD for hitting this milestone.
Hollow as it might be because of overall performance when compared to lower clocked CPUs from Intel this achievement is still pretty cool.
Keep fighting the good fight little guy. Your next Athlon XP may yet be right around the corner.
Targon - Tuesday, February 28, 2012 - link
I suspect that we are seeing performance issues due to the whole "modules" approach, and there is a lack of cache cohesion between the modules that is causing the performance problems right now. This is why I am waiting on Piledriver, since that may fix the problems with performance.Right now, if you tweak Windows to prioritize cores 1,3,5, and 7, and only put minor background tasks on cores 2,4,6, and 8, you get far better performance than if you use the stock scheduler in Windows. Doing this would basically give you a nice performance boost since the penalty for AMD using modules does not come into play.
As I said, I hope that Piledriver will fix the problem, perhaps a dedicated 8-core without using the modules approach will do the trick and make AMD more competitive.
Ammaross - Tuesday, February 28, 2012 - link
"Right now, if you tweak Windows to prioritize cores 1,3,5, and 7, and only put minor background tasks on cores 2,4,6, and 8, you get far better performance"This is false, as this is exactly what Window's bulldozer patches tries to do. Still doesn't help. The problem lies in the CPU having to rely on RAM due to a missing oversided L3 cache. This is why running a Bulldozer with 2166MHz DDR3 performs loads better than the crap 1333 or 1600 RAM that Anand et al test with "because we want to keep it fair with the max Intel supported 1600MHz RAM."