Blue Chip Technology is bringing the AMD AM3 processor to it's Vario digital signage range. AM3 is not a radical departure from AM2 but does offer some small incremental benefits. Firstly the AM3 pin out supports DDR3 memory. AM3 also debuts AMD’s Thermal Sense and Serial VID interfaces - enabling the temperatures of the individual cores to be measured more accurately and also supporting more accurate voltage control, again for individual cores. The combined result is better overall power and performance management and therefore a marginally more planet- friendly PC.
The other main change involves AM3’s pin-out arrangement. The overall number of pins drops from 940 for AM2 and AM2+ to 938. This reduction in pins is arranged to allow AM3 chips to drop into AM2 boards but not the other way around. There's a very marginal impact on performance, the AM3 does give you a few extra frames per second in HD video encoding and professional 3D rendering benchmarks. However, as future AMD processor core counts rise to eight and beyond and bandwidth becomes more of an issue, AM3 gives AMD a good position to build upon.
Initially Blue Chip's single core offering will change from the AM2 LE1600 series to the Sempron 140 matching the 2.7GHz clock speed, 1MB L2 cache and thermal profile. Moving our dual core offering from the AM2 4000 to the AM3 200 series will increase clock speed from 2.5GHz to 2.7GHz and increase the L2 cache to 1MB, again maintaining the same thermal profile.