Looking for answers
To get answers to this question and others raised by this launch we spoke to Kevin Lensing, manager of desktop products and platforms at AMD's client business unit. We started by asking why the Phenom II 920 and 940 weren't launched as AM3 parts.
"We get this question a lot," said Lensing. "We had a time to market opportunity and the memory was the hardest part for us. We saw almost no downside to launching at AM2+. A month and a half later we now have the infrastructure."
It looks like AMD didn't want to miss the CES boat just because it hadn't yet been able to perfect its DDR3 platform, but now it has. So why not launch AM3 equivalents of the 920 and 940 now? "Some time in the very near future we'll add high-end AM3 parts," said Lensing. "If we'd done so right away we would have done our partners a disservice."
Here we have one of the drawbacks of trying to launch products as early as possible. If you render a product obsolete within a month of launching it, as AMD would be doing if it made AM3 versions of the 920 and 940, that's not going to go down too well with the channel and OEM partners that have invested in it. And the importance of the channel is not lost on AMD.
While we accept that it wasn't commercially viable to render the 920 and 940 obsolete with AM3 replacements, why not launch an even higher-end AM3 CPU at a premium price? "AMD's strategy is to target enthusiasts as first adopters of DDR3 memory, and will introduce high-performance Dragon AM3 platforms during Q2," said Lensing.
