AMD Bulldozer Said to Be Compatible with AM3 Motherboards

[Free Radical]

AMD Bulldozer Said to Be Compatible with AM3 Motherboards - Softpedia

Things seems to take an interesting turn in the Bulldozer story as it appears that, contrary to what we previously knew, AMD's upcoming high-performance desktop chips will be compatible with older AM3 motherboards via a simple BIOS update.

The news comes from the Hardware-Infos website that spoke with various motherboard makers present at CeBIT and found out that Bulldozer will be compatible with AM3 motherboards.

Furthermore, at least one AMD board partner has managed to run a Bulldozer sample inside a socket AM3 board by simply building a special BIOS version.

No details regarding the performance of the Bulldozer processor when paired together with an AM3 motherboard were provided, but it is expected that there will be some sort of performance penalty as AM3+ boards are expected to support higher HyperTransport and memory speeds as well as a wider connection between the Northbridge and Southbridge.

The news is extremely surprising considering that just last year AMD said that retaining AM3 compatibility for Bulldozer wasn't possible without having to drop some of its features.

All that AMD was capable of doing, in order to ease its users' transition to the new architecture, was to make the AM3+ socket compatible with existing AM3 CPUs.

Other details are not available at this moment regarding Bulldozer's compatibility with AM3 motherboards, and we don't know if going this route (if the news is indeed true) will disable any of the CPU's features, such as Turbo Core 2.0 or its advanced power gating technology.

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.

The processor is expected to be released during the CeBIT fair, as we reported just yesterday.

Nostalgia
We had done something similar for AM2 boards like my M2NPV-VM

Interesting news for folks like me on the same boat who switched to AM3.
Now I have an 880GM-UD2H with Award bios. Eagerly looking for some bios mod action in the near future.

[TheWiz]

We are studying the AMD Developer BIOS documentaton from the Hammer-hexa core families so that hopefully we can do something very similar to this!

TheWiz

[Free Radical]

GIGABYTE TECHNOLOGY Socket AM3 - AMD 890FX - GA-890FXA-UD5 (rev. 3.1)

Socket AM3+ board.
Lets have a look under the hood now shall we

[Free Radical]

AMD FX Zambezi Processors Compatible with ASUS AM3 Motherboards Using BIOS Update

Some great news if its true

[onlyfairings2]

We studied the AMD BIOS developers also documenting the Hammer family hexagonal-base so I hope we can do something like that!