AMD Confirms FX Pricing: Mid-$300 for an 8-Core Processor

Today, we met with AMD PR and executive team at E3 2011 exhibition in Los Angeles, CA and got a confirmation of a lot of information that’s been rumored around the Internet.

In a straight talk, AMD confirmed that the pricing for FX series is going to be extremely aggressive, with their king of the hill processor, the FX-8130P coming with a street price of $320. While AMD does not want to detail the clock speeds, FX-8130P was supposed to come with a 3.8GHz core clock and Turbo 2.0 mode at 4.2GHz in 105W ACP / 130W TDP power envelope.

AMD Retail packaging for an 8-Core FX Black Edition Processor – We like the metal feeling. Photo credit: Anshel Sag

The company is targeting Back-to-School shopping period for the actual product launch, which will complete the two already available parts of the Scorpios platform: 900-Series chipset (or 9-Series, as AMD likes to call it) and Radeon HD 6000 Series of graphics cards.

According to AMD, the company decided to focus on gamers back with Phenom II launch, which was an overclocking hit among the enthusiasts, as well as popular core-unlocking feature, which was frowned internally but AMD did not “punish” any partners unlike moves we saw from competitors in the past. And to learn from AMD’s own mistakes from the past, naturally.

Rear side of AMD FX 8-Core Processor Black Edition retail packaging. Photo Credit: Anshel Sag

While the silicon team is working hard on determining the shipping clocks of the FX processors, AMD’s software team is “working heavily to help utilize eight cores in all applications, as well as games. We’re working with partners to help leverage those capabilities.”

All in all, we can say that AMD plans to return themselves to 20+ percent processor market share and offer the best value for gamers. As we all know, strong competition is key to having decent prices on the market (does anyone remember the time when a single GPU cart was selling for $500?). Only time will tell did AMD got this one right.

Original Author: Theo Valich

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