AMD Talks About Phenom II X6’s Turbo Core

Posted 04/08/2010 at 1:30pm | by Gordon Mah Ung

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AMD’s upcoming Phenom II X6 will include a “Turbo Core” feature that clocks up three of the chips cores by 500MHz, the company confirmed.

Seeking to “clear the air” on, umm, a phenomenal amount of leaks about its new hexa-core design, AMD officials detailed the most head-turning feature: Turbo Core.

When the CPU is under lightly-threaded tasks, the chip will run three of the cores 500MHz faster. Turbo Core is in response to the lack of applications that are optimized for quad core or higher. Turbo Core will keep the thermals and power consumption within the limits for the chip. The feature is baked into the new hexa-core Phenom II X6 and is independent of any app or OS.

The feature is similar to Intel’s own Turbo Boost feature (originally called Turbo Mode) that overclocks from one to four cores depending on the thermals, power consumption and load on the processor. AMD’s approach appears to be far less granular than Intel’s as its 500MHz on three cores or nothing.

Officials also put to rest fear that DDR2 and AM2+ support would be left out in the Phenom II X6 lineup. Several months ago, AMD officials told Maximum PC that the Phenom II X6 would be DDR3 only—that position has since been reversed and the X6 CPUs will indeed be backward compatible with most AM2+ boards that support the higher thermals. The chip will continue to be a monolithic design and be built on a 45nm process.

AMD officials said they could not discuss additional features or specs of the upcoming launch but confirmed that the top-end Phenom II X6 would be introduced at speeds in excess of 3GHz along with several other SKUs and at a competitive price to Intel’s parts.

Details of the Phenom II X6 have circulated the web for months now and last month, Norwegian retailer Microplex listed full details of a Phenom II X6 1090T and 1055T. Wikipedia’s entry for the chip lists the Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition as a 3.2GHz part with a Turbo Core speed of 3.6GHz, 3MB of L2 and 6MB of L3. The site lists four more X6 parts with frequencies rangeing from 2.6GHz to 3.0GHz with Turbo Core pushing each chip’s speed up by 500MHz. Wikiepedia goes so far as to even list the part number for the unreleased CPUs and indicates that a quad-core chip, codenamed Zosma will also feature Turbo Core.

Again, while AMD officials would not confirm details of Phenom II X6 beyond the Turbo Core details and its highest clocked iteration, rumors indicate that the chip is expected to launch on April 27 with various prices putting it about $300.