Get me accustomed with AMD

[Deleted]

Job interview at a computer/electronics store tomorrow and I'm worried my knowledge will fall short. I never owned a AMD system so I don't really know how their hierarchy works. Their product names look a little confusing to me so it would be hard for me to recommend their products to customers. My question is; can anyone enlighten me to which of their products are good/new/coming up, or refer me to a website that does?

I understand that this question isn't really all that techreated or deals with a problem but I thought thie computer forum would be the best place to post it in.

Thanks.

[Cyanotical]

the new K series is a one up from intel, FX-4xxx, FX-6xxx, FX-8xxx instead of i3,i5,i7

their Black Edition CPUs are like intel's K/X series, they have an unlocked multiplier and can be overclocked

the AMD vision is a simple area tag, Black being the highest, generally you want your parts to have the same AMD Vision tag, ie all Black Edition

their server CPUs are called Opteron, and have as many as 12 cores and use an LGA socket

APUs are CPUs with an integrated DX11 GPU, and go in socket FM1 motherboards, socket AM3+ are motherboards for Bulldozer CPUs

[Deleted]

I won't be much help regarding the older AMD processors, but here's my share of knowledge;

The most used AMD consumer processors for the past couple of years were the AMD Phenom series.
They come/came in many different kinds, as to the point you acutally got confused.

However, the naming scheme actually makes sense in some way.

Phenom is the "codename" for their high performance CPU's. Anything marked Phenom indicates it has some power to it.
The Phenom architecture has been around for quite a while. Right now we're sitting at Phenom II, which is a revised and more powerfull version of the old Phenoms.
After the word "Phenom" an X is put, and after the X is a number. (Phenom II X#). The number indicates how many cores the processor has. For example, my Phenom is called the AMD Phenom II X4 965, and thus has 4 cores. There's also X2, X3 and X6.
I don't exactly know what the last 3 digits mean, but the higher these are the higher the stock clock is (Basicly the same chip sold at a higher price point because it's one of the better chips from the batch.)
Many Phenom II X2 processors can be unlocked to X4's. Why you might ask? Well, the X2 is the same chip as the X4, but with 2 cores disabled due to issues with either one. Most of the time you can unlock these again (most AMD motherboards support this) and by upping the voltage a bit these chips are stable and operate just like a quad core would.

The AMD Athlon series is more consumer-friendly and is used in lower-end machines used for office tasks, and they perform just well for that. They're also dirt cheap and come in dual and quad cores aswell, but besides that I don't know much about them.

AMD also owns a deal of the mobile marked with their Turion series and Fusion platform. The latter is most commonly used in small notebooks. They have low power consumption and acceptable performance which is probably why they're such a big succes.

AMD recently put out their new Bulldozer series of CPU's. They were argued to compete with the intel i5 and i7 series but never really lived up to their rumors. They're power-hungry chips and are (as far as I read) not that good at single threaded performance.
They do however feature 8 cores which makes them more ideal outside gaming for rendering and the likes.

I hope somebody corrects me on the Bulldozer part of my post as I really never read into it too much after hearing they weren't that good at all.

Hope this helps.

[Deleted]

Thanks for the replies, cleared up a little of the confusion and was a great read. The naming part really got to me and it's a little hard to compare. The core unlocking thing is pretty neat.

[haxartus]

The AMD Athlon series is more consumer-friendly and is used in lower-end machines used for office tasks, and they perform just well for that. They're also dirt cheap and come in dual and quad cores aswell, but besides that I don't know much about them.

The biggest difference with the Phenoms is that they don't have L3 cache. However, some 3 core Athlons are in fact locked Deneb chips (Phenom II) and can be unlocked to a full Phenom II X3 or Phenom II X4.