[McG]

AMD's newest roadmap reveals a major shift in early 2010: the company will once again overhaul its socket architecture to make way for DDR3 support. The new socket, dubbed G34, will also ship with two new second-generation 45nm processors. The first of these processors, 8-core Sao Paolo, is described as a "twin native-quadcore Shanghai processor" by one AMD engineer. This past April, AMD guidance hinted at a 12-core behemoth of a processor. This CPU is now named Magny-Cours after the French town made famous by its Formula One French Grand Prix circuit.

AMD insiders would reveal very little about the G34 socket, other than its a derivative of the highly secretive G3 socket that was to replace Socket F (1207). As far as company documentation goes, G3 ceased to exist in March 2008, and has been replaced with the G34 program instead. The first of these sockets will be available for develops in early 2009. We counted 1974 pin connects on the leaked G34 diagram -- 767 more pins than AMD's current LGA1207 socket. Given the additional interconnect pathways for DDR3 and the HyperTransport buses, a significant increase in the number of pins was to be expected.

Izvor: DailyTech