After having showcased its Piledriver desktop processors, which have been codenamed Vishera, at the IDF in September, chip-maker AMD has now officially launched the eight-core Vishera chip.

Though, like the disastrous Bulldozer Zambezi chip, the Vishera processors will use Socket AM3+, the four versions of the newly-released chips will be branded with the FX label, and will all be based on the new Piledriver architecture. As per the AMD claims, Piledriver architecture offers better branch prediction and notable enhancements to Level 2 cache efficiency and scheduling.

With the Piledriver architecture, in tandem with higher clock speeds, promising a nearly 15 percent improvement in overall performance over the Bulldozer cores, the low-end Vishera processor - which will be the quad-core FX-4300 - will probably be capable of clocking 3.8GHz augmented further to 4.0GHz, with 4MB of Level 3 cache.

With AMD having ensured that there is feature uniformity all across its Vishera FX range - which, other than FX-4300, comprises six-core FX-6300; and eight-core FX-8320 and FX-8350 -, the six-core chips will sport 1MB of Level 2 cache per core; and the eight-core chips will have 8MB of Level 3 cache.

The cost of AMD's new Vishera range of chips ranges from between $122 for the entry-level quad-core FX-4300 processor to $95 for the high-end eight-core FX-8350 chip.