After last week’s news that AMD would be releasing the tantalizingly-Bulldozer butstrictly server-oriented Interlagos chip, we were all a little worried about the fate of its long-awaited desktop counterpart Zambezi — and the rebirth of the rig builder’s favorite “FX” moniker. Well, there’s good news and bad news: we now have a release date — fourth quarter, so any time between October and December — and we also have thepricing.

AMD’s FX Series will be very, very cheap: the six-core FX-6100 (i.e. three Bulldozer modules) clocked at 3.3GHz, with a Turbo Core boost to 3.9GHz, will retail for just $155. The eight-core (four-module) FX-8120, clocked at 3.1GHz and boosted to 4GHz, will retail for $185 — and the 3.6GHz/4.2GHz FX-8150 will retail for $230. Each Bulldozer module has 2MB of L2 cache, so the FX-6100 has 6MB of L2 — and its eight-core brethren have 8MB. All three chips have 8MB of L3 cache.

See Also:

• AMD names Lenovo exec Rory Read CEO, eyes post PC plan by bestlaptopbattery.co.uk
• Apple's A6 Chip To Boost Speed And Battery Life in New iPad
• Acer prepping first laptop using Nvidia’s Tegra 2 chip
• IBM is very optimistic about the potential of this chip

Why is any of the above bad news? Well, the pricing is possibly too cheap. Early benchmarks of Bulldozer showed that Zambezi was never likely to be competitive with Intel’s Core i7 — and these prices, which are all well below any of Intel’s comparable i7 (and even some i5) Sandy Bridge chips, suggest that the FX Series chips are priced to sell rather than compete. The nearest-spec chip to the FX-8150, for example, is the Core i7-2600, which has an Intel-suggested retail price of $294 — some $60 more than the AMD chip. If you compare the FX against the “overclockable” 2600k, the price difference is even more pronounced.

In all likelihood, though, AMD probably never intended to compete with Intel in terms of raw processing power — and the just-announced Intel i7-2700k, which will arrive around the same time as the FX Series, will certainly make sure of that. Zambezi, if anything, is simply intended to close the widening gap between Phenom II and Sandy Bridge — to prove to consumers and OEMs that AMD still knows know to make a competitive CPU. Here’s hoping.

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