AMD Preparing Thuban Processor For April Release

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Information has come out regarding AMD’s upcoming Thuban processors, which will be six-core specials. Rumors has it that AMD will showcase the new multi-core processors at the CeBIT conference in Germany next week, and that they’ll officially be launched on April 26th. The new chips will be sold in the AMD Phenom II X6 line.

Earlier today, I covered Intel’s Westmere chips, which are soon coming to market on March 14th, as the consumer desktop market’s first six-core processor. AMD will be releasing their consumer desktop six-core processor a little later, as mentioned above, on April 26th.

AMD’s new motherboard chipset, 890GX will have support for these new Thuban chips. Rumor has it that AMD can patch in compatability with the new chips on the older 785G, 790FX and 790GX motherboards via a BIOS upgrade. Another report has it that the Thuban cores will support dynamic performance overclocking.

Dynamic performance boosting was popularized by Intel’s Turbo Boost technology. When more processing power is required, the processor will disable some cores in favor of overclocking the remaining cores. Both Intel and AMD seem keen on these dynamic overclocking features for their multi-core processors (which processors aren’t multi-core, these days?), so expect AMD to start adapting this technology to all of the new chips.

CeBIT could be a big show for AMD this year. In addition to their rumored Thuban reveal, their partner ASUS will reportedly show of the first motherboard to first AMD’s new 890GX chipset. The M4A89GTD Pro will allegedly be shown off and CeBIT and go on sale shortly after that with a price of €120 ($164).