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AMD three-core Phenoms to ship March 2008?

Basic details have begun to filter through regarding AMD's three-core Phenom line-up, due to go on sale in Q1 2008.

That's AMD's official launch window, but according to motherboard-maker moles cited by DIgiTimes, they'll actually appear at the end of the that quarter, in March 2008.

The sources said the chips are - surprise, surprise - fabbed at 65nm, equipped with the Socket AM2+ interface and sit on a HyperTransport 3.0 bus. All of which, anyone could guess at based on what's leaked out already about the larger Phenom family.

The tri-core chips will contain 2MB of L3 cache shared among the three processing cores, each of which has its own, dedicated L2 cache, the size of which remains unknown, though 512KB is a good bet. We also suggest AMD equip its chips with the ability to support 800MHz DDR 2 memory.

More interesting are the moles' claims that we won't see second-generation tri-core Phenoms until H1 2009, when they will be upgraded to a 45nm production process, the HyperTransport 3-enabled Socket AM3 interconnect and the ability to use DDR 3 memory.

AMD announced the three-core CPU series in September. The chips are almost certainly quad-core parts that have failed to pass AMD's tests for full four-core operation. Rather than bin them, or release them as even lower cost dual-core parts, AMD gets to offer them as mid-range parts. ®

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