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The Engadget Interview: AMD's Sasa Marinkovic
This isn't the easiest time to be an AMD fan. The company's eight-core FX-8150 desktop chip was widely panned on the review circuit, and then NVIDIA's GTX 680 graphics card ran off with Radeon HD's thunder. Even when you look at notebook processors, where AMD has long excelled with its Fusion APUs, the hype wars currently favor Ultrabooks and Ivy Bridge. Affection for the gamers' brand and its ATI back-story may make this stuff uncomfortable, but the predicament is already starting to mess with AMD's balance sheet. Which raises the obvious question: what's to be done? Sasa Marinkovic, AMD's Head of Desktop and Software Product Marketing, bravely took up the challenge of providing his side of the story -- even after we warned him that we'd try to disrupt his flow with accusatory glances. In the end, we did get him to acknowledge some recent hard knocks, particularly with respect to the FX chips and their (lack of) single-threaded performance. But we also got some insight into the mind of a chap who remains genuinely and abundantly confident about his employer's future. Read on and see for yourself.
AMD rolls out two new Bulldozer chips, cuts price of the FX-8120 to celebrate
Like Hugh Hefner (probably), AMD took a good hard look at its lineup this week and decided it was high time to add a pair of models. Two new Bulldozer-powered FX CPUs will join the pantheon of world-record beating chips in the company's constant fight against the forces of Intel. The quad-core FX-4170 has a 4.2GHz CPU with 4.3GHz Turbo mode (for more on AMD's Bulldozer architecture, see here) while the six-core FX-6200 has a 3.8GHz base clock and a 4.1GHz Turbo mode. Availability will vary by region as the company shuttles out the new silicon on a rolling timeline, but we'd start keeping our eyes peeled next time you're down the shops. To celebrate, AMD is hacking down the price of the top-end FX-8150 from $245 to $185 and you should see a similar price drop from outlets filter through shortly. After the break we've got all the stats we were able to type about these slices of silicon before our palms got sweaty.
AMD FX processor brings eight cores to battle, we go eyes-on (video)
AMD fans have endured a long wait for this, while being reduced to spectators as Intel spews out an ever-increasing horde of Sandy Bridge variants and builds up the hype around its next-gen Ivy Bridge architecture. But the new FX series of processors is finally here and will be available to buy in the next few days, with the top-end FX-8150 priced at $245 in exchange for eight cores, a 3.6GHz base clock speed and easy over-clocking to 4.8GHz using the packaged Overdrive software. Your AM3+ motherboard is crying out for the upgrade, but don't succumb until you've clicked past the break -- we've got details of the full range and pricing, our initial impressions and an eyes-on video that includes a detailed chat with the guys from AMD.
