We have all heard the rumors, but it appears to be true.  We had originally heard about a “Centurion” product which would be for extreme overclockers on the AMD side, running at 5 GHz with a 220 watt TDP.  Now we finally get to see what all the fuss is about.  AMD is releasing two new Vishera based processors that, for the time being, will be limited to system integrators and will be available later this summer.

The top end product is the FX-9590 which has a top turbo speed of 5 GHz.  This will be a full four module implementation with the 8 MB of L3 cache.  AMD did not give any other details for this particular part.  We do not know what the base clock is, we do not know what the TDP is, and we can only assume that the northbridge/L3 cache will be clocked at the standard 2.2 GHz that we have seen on previous Vishera parts.

The second product is the FX-9370 which is again a four module part that has a top turbo speed of 4.7 GHz.  Remember that the four modules each have two “cores”, so it is still considered an eight core part.  These processors are unlocked, so they can be further overclocked if one so desires.  TDP and other details were again skipped for this particular part.

These parts will be going to system integrators first, and I am not entirely sure that AMD will sell them on the market direct to consumers.  If AMD does in fact sell to consumers (not implied at all in the press release) then they likely will have to bundle it with a very robust cooler.  Probably something along the lines of what we saw with the original FX-8150 LCS bundle.

Consider that the FX-8350 is a 4 GHz base clock product with a max turbo of 4.2 GHz and having a TDP of 125 watts, we probably have to assume that the 220 watt number bandied about is accurate.  A pretty beefy air cooler would be required, or the aforementioned liquid cooling system.  AMD also likely had GLOBALFOUNDRIES change the “mix” when fabricating these parts.  These batches probably feature more leaky transistors that can achieve higher speeds without an extreme amount of voltage.

This is an interesting move by AMD.  Remember those TWKR chips that they released that were designed for LN2 use?  There were a very limited number of those units, and we can imagine that while the FX-9000 series will be in greater numbers they still will not be commonplace on the retail market.  SI’s like Maingear will be introducing systems this summer featuring these chips.  Performance will be good with these solutions, but the tradeoff is of course power consumption and heat production as compared to similarly performing (and stock clocked) Intel i7 3770K and 4770K parts.

AMD is doing their best to address the enthusiast market, but until Kaveri hits the streets we will not see any major upgrades beyond these parts.

Update:

We received some further info about this chip.  The TDP is up in the 220 watt region.  It utilizes Turbo Core 3.0 to help achieve those speeds, so it seems that some of the work that went into Richland has made it into these latest FX processors.  BIOS updates are probably a must.  These chips will only be going to system integrators (SIs) and will be bundled with a liquid cooling system.  We have no idea what the price will be since these will only be sold to SIs.  Systems should be available after July 16.