It's Official: AMD Confirms Hexa-Core Thuban CPU

[SandmanNinja]

It's Official: AMD Confirms Hexa-Core Thuban CPU

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/its_official_amd_confirms_hexacore_thuban_cpu

 

Backwards Compatility with AM3 is the Big Surprise

 

Eat that Gulftown: AMD officials have not only confirmed that it will release a hexa-core processor next year – but it will be backwards compatible with existing AM3 and AM2+ motherboards.

 

Although heavily reported as a rumor that an AMD six-core was coming to consumer desktops, the company had not confirmed rumors. That is until Monday, when AMD officials told Maximum PC that the chip was a done deal.

 

“We are all about platform longevity and long-lived upgrade paths,” and AMD spokesman said in a sideways ding at its competitor Intel which has a penchant for requiring new sockets for its CPUs. Intel currently has three different socket infrastructures on its desktop computers – all incompatible. The confirmation also comes one day before Intel’s three-day IDF conference which usually blots out all news from competitors for days.

 

AMD’s chip is codenamed Thuban and will feature all six cores on single 45nm die. Thuban will feature an integrated DDR3 controller. The company didn’t confirm branding but the chip is expected to be labeled as the Phenom II X6. The chip is derivative of the six-core Opteron chip which made its earlier this summer.

 

Extrapolating from the hexa-core Opteron, Thuban is likely to be a 346mm2 chip and have a massive 904 million transistors. As a comparison, Intel’s Core i7-975 Extreme Editions have 731 million transistors on a 262mm2 die, the Core i5-750 has 774 million transistors with 296mm2 die and the Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition 758 million transistors on a 258mm2 die.

 

The chip is expected to have 3MB of L2 and 6MB of L3 cache. The company did not specific initial clock speeds but they are not expected to be as high as the quad-core parts. That’s likely due to added thermal output from the two additional cores.

 

Thuban is not due until sometime next year and is unlikely to beat Intel’s Gulftown to stores shelves. Intel’s Gulftown, likely to be called Core i9, when it is released, will slip into existing LGA1366 boards and will offer 12-threads to the OS with six of those coming from cores, and the other six from HyperThreading.

[Tommy L]

So is there an existing motherboard that will take twin new AMD chips?

Any word on the pricing for the processor?

[SandmanNinja]

I'm an Intel fanboy - just posting to let the others know.

 

I think the article states that the new chip will slip into existing LGA1366 boards.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

 

“We are all about platform longevity and long-lived upgrade paths,” and AMD spokesman said in a sideways ding at its competitor Intel which has a penchant for requiring new sockets for its CPUs.

 

No word on how fast these will be in terms of rendering? I suppose no one has had a chance to run them through there paces. My guess off hand is that AMD is recognizing that they are slower than the Intel's. They are playing up the fact that they believe in longevity compared to Intel. In other words, they are striving to provide value through this, rather than value through speed.

 

This is just what I am guessing from this quote though.

[Matt McDonald]

Max likes 2 cores, 4 cores, 8 cores, 16 cores, etc. 6 cores, not so much...scanline anyways.

 

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=3571&p=8

[Tim Nelson]

No word on how fast these will be in terms of rendering? I suppose no one has had a chance to run them through there paces. My guess off hand is that AMD is recognizing that they are slower than the Intel's. They are playing up the fact that they believe in longevity compared to Intel. In other words, they are striving to provide value through this, rather than value through speed.

 

This is just what I am guessing from this quote though.

Pretty good guess! I'd have to agree with that theory. I also agree that 6 cores is a little odd. But hey, if it works, fine by me!

[SandmanNinja]

And if this new cpu can be dropped into an existing motherboard, that tells me that it can't be that radically different to the existing chips. Maybe just tweaking internal bits?

 

Back in Ye Olden Times, Intel was the only chip manufacturer that had 2 R&D teams for CPUs. As the current team made advances, they passed them on to the even-further-out team to incorporate. I can't remember the details.