MSI and ASRock Present AM3+ Bulldozer Motherboards Powered by AMD 800-series Chipsets
Right before the start of CeBIT 2011, MSI has decided to present some of the members of the press a few of its upcoming platforms and one of the most interesting solutions was an AM3+ motherboard, designed to support AMD's future Bulldozer high-performance processors.
What is interesting about this new board is that it uses an AMD 800-series chipset, the same controller used in today's AM3 motherboards.
Why MSI decided to go this route remains uncertain at this time, but, most probably, the company wants to increase the volume of AMD3+ motherboards available when Bulldozer launches in the second quarter of 2011.
To distinguish the new boards from their AM3 counterparts, MSI has decided to paint the CPU socket black and all of its boards will be clearly marked to reflect the socket supported.
However, far more interesting is that an MSI official has said, during the presentation, that by pairing together a Bulldozer processor with an 800-series motherboard users won't have to give up on any of the processor's newly introduced features.
If this is indeed true it remains to be seen, but this latest news seems to confirm a rumor that we have uncovered yesterday regarding Bulldozer's compatibility with existing AM3 motherboards.
MSI's new motherboards are expected to be launched in early April.
Besides MSI, ASRock has also showcased two AM3+ board models that are based on 800-series AMD chipsets. These were called 890FX Deluxe5 and 890GX Extreme4 R2.0 and used the same black CPU socket design as MSI.
Bulldozer is AMD's next-generation high-performance CPU architecture that was designed from the ground up in order to eliminate some of the redundancies that come with traditional multi-core designs and a Bulldozer module should be able to deliver about 92% of the throughput of a similar native dual-core chip.
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