Although we are still a few months away from the launch of AMD's Zambezi line of desktop processors, some motherboard makers have already announced solutions built around the AM3+ socket and Gigabyte's GA-890FXA-UD5 is one of the first such products to reach retail.
The GA-890FXA-UD5 was actually launched by Gigabyte quite a while ago, but the AM3+ version of the motherboard is based on the 3.1 revision which adds support for Bulldozer desktop processors as well as for 2000MHz DDR3 memory (via overclocking).
Otherwise, there aren't that many changes to note and the board still carries four PCI Express x16 slots, two PCIe x1 and one regular PCI slots, eight SATA ports as well as Gigabit Ethernet and USB 3.0 connectivity.
Price wise, the motherboard was listed at 19,800 yen which translates into about $242 US.
Until now, ASRock and MSI have also showcased AM3+ motherboards built around AMD's 800-series chipsets, and the 890GM Pro3 R2.0 even went on sale at the end of last week.
On the other hand, Asus has announced that six of its AM3 motherboards, including the high performance Crosshair IV Extreme and Crosshair IV Formula, can be upgraded to support AM3+ CPUs via a simple BIOS update that was posted on the company's FTP.
This confirms previous rumors that suggested AMD Bulldozer processor are actually compatible with regular AM3 motherboards.
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.
As a result, the chip uses a modular construction and each module is made of two 128-bit FMA floating point units, which can be combined into one 256-bit FPU, two integer cores, with four pipelines each, as much as 2048KB of L2 cache, and 8MB of shared L3 cache.
