AMD’s ‘Piledriver’ to put the hurt on Intel

A leaked road map on a Chinese website shows that AMD technology is planning to release a 10 core CPU codenamed “Piledriver” in 2012. The reported road map shows that AMD’s previous Mainstream platform will be taken over by the new Virgo line of CPUs while Brazos will fall to Deccan (Quad core verison of the Brazos line).

The trinity APU also makes an appearance, reported to be utilizing four ‘Piledriver’ cores. The 10 core chip named Komodo will obviously be released as a high end model that will utilize the Socket FM2 motherboards, yes folks, your current AM2+, AM3, FM1 sockets would not be compatible, can you say “Time for an upgrade” – well, when the time comes that is. And a side note to all this – AMD is planning to release its first line up of Radeon HD 7000 series graphics chips. Talk about icing on a cake.

Given the fact that many CPU and GPU intensive tasks like gaming, media editing and other stuff alike require a lot of horsepower but these days software and games haven’t even been programmed to utilize the full potential of quad core CPUs like the Intel’s core i5 and i7 series and some of the models in the i3 line or AMD’s Athlon, Phenom and the quad core Fusion APUs, it’s not the programmer’s fault, it is simply because optimizing a program for quad core CPUs tends to get a little hairy. So, with all this in mind, I’m not sure how I feel about the ‘Piledriver’ series. The nerdy side of me wants to get a hold of that chip when it comes out, but the average Joe in me is like – ‘meh’.

Either way, this will be a big step up for AMD because Intel has not come out with any information for a similar Deca core processor. This could very well put AMD on the map back again, as of recent years, Intel has been leading the line in terms of high performance processing beasts. However, Intel does have plans to transition its chip from the current 32nm Sandy Bridge die shrink to the 22nm Ivy Bridge sometime next year. We’ll just have to wait and see what the hardware giants have in store for us. And let the CPU wars begin. Peace out!