AMD's focus for the start of this year has been on explaining the virtues of Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) and driving up gaming interest with the impressive Never Settle bundle, available for most mainstream and high-end Radeon cards.
With attention directed elsewhere, AMD's beleaguered FX processors have, it seems, been consigned to the ash heap of history. These chips do without the baked-in graphics present on APUs and, while perfectly reasonable in their own right, are overshadowed by Intel's third-generation Core 'Ivy Bridge' processors.
So how about this as a rumour for a Friday morning? Though AMD will never go on record and confirm this, we have it on good authority that the chip-maker will soon be releasing a super-FX chip. Based on the same 'Vishera' architecture powering the current FX-8350, which runs at up to 4.2GHz, this new FX, codenamed 'Centurion', is to be made available in very limited quantities.
This so-called Centurion is guaranteed to run at 5GHz, on air, though we don't know exactly what voltage or supporting hardware will be required for this lofty speed.
Here's the kicker; our sources indicate that this limited-edition chip is set to cost a whopping $795 - this is not a typo! Yup, back to the pricing of FX chips of old. Is there any way that you, the readers, can countenance such pricing for an architecture that's been in the doldrums of late? Let us know your thoughts in the forums.
