AMD will launch its hexa-core Phenom II X6 processor in a few weeks an beside being the first six-core for retail it has another bit of news to present. The first Phenom II processors sporting automatic overclocking of individual cores. AMD calls it Turbo CORE and it has now shed some more light on the technology and what we should expect from it.
AMD Turbo CORE is not as advanced as Intel’s Turbo Boost. The reason is quite simple, Intel built the Turbo technology as a part of the Nehalem architecture while AMD more or less added Turbo CORE to an existing architecture.
AMD can not control individual gates like Intel and even if it can never turn of a core completely Turbo CORE has good potential. The technology has an On and an Off mode. Turbo CORE kicks in if fewer than three cores are active, if four or more are used the processor remains at stock frequency. It’s all automatic and no need for any special drivers or software.
Turbo CORE works so that the idle cores are downclocked by 800MHz while the active cores (3 at most) increase by 500MHz. This is done with a minor increase in voltage, affecting all cores.
Power consumption will remain in the same TDP envelope and keeping a hexa-core Phenom II CPU under 125W is a bit impressive considering how much the quad-core Phenom II CPUs consume.
How well Turbo CORE performs in real life use is something we will get to see soon, but on paper it looks like a good solution while waiting for AMD’s new processor architecture.
| CPU | Clock. | Max Turbo ( 3 cores) | L3 Cache | TDP | Launch |
| PII X6 1090T | 3.2GHz | 3.6GHz | 6MB | 125W | Q2 |
| PII X6 1075T | 3.0GHz | 3.5GHz | 6MB | 125W | Q3 |
| PII X6 1055T | 2.8GHz | 3.3GHz | 6MB | 125W/95W | Q2 |
| PII X6 1035T | 2.6GHz | 3.1GHz | 6MB | 95W | Q2 |
| PII X4 960T | 3.0GHz | 3.4GHz | 6MB | 95W | Q2 |
