AMD Airs Two New Bulldozer Chips, Drops Price on a Third Chip

From DailyTech: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) has just injected some new performance CPUs into its lineup, hoping to boost this segment where it is struggling to stay competitive.

The chipmaker has seen stellar success with its accelerated processing units (APUs), which offset modest CPU performance with a trifecta of a low price point, strong graphics performance, and low power consumption. AMD's plans for 2012 are mostly focused on continuing and expanding its successful APU lineup.

Despite being APU-preoccupied (and for sound financial cause), AMD is quietly also continuing development of traditional non-APU sales with the Bulldozer-based FX Series, performance personal computer CPUs. Thus far, the reception has been tepid at best.

The FX-4xxx/6xxx/8xxx variants (4, 6, and 8-cores respectively), launched in Oct. 2011, underwhelmed in terms of performance. The problems seemingly lay in AMD's heavy focus on threading, which came at the expense of performance in more common lightly threaded workloads and power performance. At the end of the day AMD has chips that are power hungry and generally inferior to rival Intel Corp.'s (INTC) cheaper Sandy Bridge offerings in most circumstances, though offering justifiable bang-for-your-buck in heavily threaded workloads.

AMD is countering these issues by expanding its lineup and shifting its price points downward. Yesterday it announced that it would be discounting its octa-core FX-8120 chip by $20 USD (original MSRP $205 USD). It also announced two new chip models, the FX-6200 and FX-4170.

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