jmke

This new six-core "Thuban" codenamed die weights in with an estimated count of over 900 million transistors compared to the 758 million transistors of "Deneb", most of which is concerned with packing in those two additional CPU cores over its predecessor, which has been achieved by increasing the overall die size to 346mm² against 258mm² for earlier Phenom II parts. Despite those additional cores, Thuban still sports the same shared 6MB of level 3 cache as Phenom II X4 CPUs, although it does receive an additional 1MB of level 2 cache to give it 3MB in total (although this still totals 512KB per core). All of this is fitted into AMD's existing AM3 socket, complete with DDR2 and DDR3 memory support, and with a TDP of 125 Watts.

The only other big change for the Phenom II X6 over previous Phenom II CPUs is the introduction of AMD's answer to Intel's "Turbo Mode", known as "Turbo Core". Although its mechanics are somewhat simpler than Intel's own turbo mode, the basic concept is the same, allowing the Phenom II X6 to boost the clock speed of a core from its standard 3.2GHz to a peak of 3.6GHz while remaining within its TDP by independently increasing the clock speeds of some cores (up to three at any one time) while others are dormant and not doing any work, thus boosting performance in scenarios where not all six cores are busy.

http://www.elitebastards.com/index.p...d=32&Itemid=27

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