AMD is usually pretty aggressive with turning process tweaks and yield improvements into new products. Just two months ago AMD gave us the Athlon II X3 450 and the Phenom II X2 560, today we're getting speed bumps of both of those parts. The Athlon II X3 455 runs at 3.3GHz, up from 3.2GHz and costs the same $87. You get an additional 100MHz for free. The chip hasn't changed otherwise. You get a quad-core die with one core disabled, no L3 cache and a 512KB L2 per core.

The Phenom II X2 565 is an unlocked Black Edition part, also identical to its predecessors. Here you have a quad-core die with two cores disabled, a 512KB L2 per core and a shared 6MB L3. The 565 runs at 3.4GHz, up from 3.3GHz, but the clock increase comes with a $10 price increase.

The six-core Phenom II X6 gets a speed bump as well. The 1100T increases default clock speeds from 3.2GHz to 3.3GHz, and increases Turbo Core frequency from 3.6GHz to 3.7GHz. Turbo Core is only supported on Thuban based processors (currently only Phenom II X6s) and increases operating frequency if half or fewer cores are actively in use. 

Read on for our full review.

I don’t know the last time I was this excited about AMD’s roadmap. Zacate and Ontario are due out in a quarter, and both promise to bring competition to an area where we haven’t seen much from AMD.

Llano is slated for release near the end of Q2 next year. While it won’t be a big step forward in CPU performance, we should see a huge increase in integrated graphics performance.

Sampling in Q4 of this year and shipping sometime next year is AMD’s next-generation microarchitecture: Bulldozer.

Within the course of twelve months we will see AMD introduce three drastically different microprocessors into the market’s eager hands. We’ve been dying for more competition and AMD is planning on giving us just that. But that's the future, what about the present?

Today AMD announced speed bumps to nearly every processor in its desktop lineup. Everything from the dual-core Athlon II to the six-core Phenom II gets a new family member today. And they’re all very attractively priced.

Earlier today AMD announced its Phenom II X6 processors. One vendor even started offering them at a huge discount if you're willing to put up with a mail in rebate. The X6 is quite possibly the most affordable route to tons of threaded compute power. If you do a lot of video encoding or offline 3D rendering, for $150 you can't beat the deal TigerDirect is running on the 1055T. And it looks to be a beast of an overclocker.

The new X6s are supposed to work in all Socket-AM2+ and Socket-AM3 motherboards, all you need is a BIOS update. Many of you asked for a performance comparison between AM2+ and AM3 with the X6, but I quickly realized that none of the boards I had around the lab supported the chip. I decided to do a quick survey of all of the motherboard manufacturers to see who was ahead of the game on enabling Phenom II X6 support:

ASUS and Gigabyte lead the charge with 37 and 43 boards supported at launch. The star next to Gigabyte's number means that you'll have to do some digging to find all of the Gigabyte boards with support. The CPU supported list only lists 10 boards but if you dig through Gigabyte's BIOS pages you'll find a lot more. In terms of older AM2+ boards, ASUS and ECS support 19 and 16 respectively. AMD tells us that the priority is to enable AM3 motherboards so over the coming weeks we'll see the AM2+ numbers climb.

Have any of you pulled the trigger on a Phenom II X6 purchase? What board are you pairing it with? Leave your experiences in the comments!

In most of my CPU reviews I tend to focus on light overclocking - the low hanging fruit if you will. Over the past few years the focus has shifted from absolute performance to performance per watt. An overclock stops being so interesting if you have to incur a huge power penalty to get there. That's the reason I've put more emphasis on stock voltage overclocks in the past few years.

The fact that I was able to get my Phenom II X6 1090T running at 3.8GHz with minimal effort was very impressive in my opinion. Remember that unlike Gulftown, AMD didn't get the benefit of a process shrink with the Phenom II X6. Six cores and nearly a billion transistors running at 3.8GHz with less than 10% more core voltage is awesome. But you all wanted more:

The most I could get out of the X6, reliably with air cooling, was 4GHz. It required more voltage than 3.8GHz but it's doable. The other important takeaway? It was fully stable in a 64-bit OS. In the past we've had issues with AMD's processors and ~4GHz overclocks in 64-bit Windows, but Thuban appears to have fixed that. I'm able to get into Windows at 4.1GHz but not what I would consider stable.

Note that at 4GHz the Phenom II X6 is faster than a Core i7 975 in our x264 encoding test.

Early this morning AMD officially launched its first six-core Thuban processors: the Phenom II X6 1090T and 1055T. The last thing we would dream of doing is complain about pricing on these parts. AMD is selling you almost a billion transistors for $199 or $285 depending on what clock speed you want.

AMD just sent us word that the pricing story gets even better. TigerDirect is running a $50 mail in rebate on the new X6 processors dropping the price down to $149.99 and $249.99 for the 1055T and 1090T, respectively. While we're not huge fans of mail in rebates, if you're fine with getting a check in the mail sometime later then you honestly can't beat these deals. At $149.99 there simply is no answer to AMD's Phenom II X6 1055T.

Update: The deal is dead, congrats to those who got in.

AMD's Phenom II X6 is here based on the brand new Thuban core. Boasting Turbo Core support and nearly 1 billion transistors, AMD is willing to sell you six of its finest cores for under $300. The price drops to under $200 if you're willing to deal with a 2.8GHz clock speed.

AMD is continuing its strategy of selling you more cores than Intel at the same price. With the Phenom II X6, AMD is going after Intel's Lynnfield CPUs - primarily the Core i5 750 and Core i7 860. In our tests we found that the Phenom II X6 excels (as expected) at heavily threaded applications, while lightly threaded apps or mixed workloads generally favor Intel's quad-core chips. It's the expected outcome we've been seeing for the past few months here - if you need lots of threads below $300, go AMD otherwise go Intel.

Read on to get the full story on AMD's Phenom II X6.

Last month Intel introduced its first desktop 6-core CPU, the 32nm Gulftown Core i7 980X. Running at 3.33GHz we loved the fact that it’s quite possibly the first Extreme Edition part that is able to justify its price. For $999 you get six cores and better performance all in the same power envelope as the current high end quad-core i7s.

The 980X is a great chip, but spending $999 on a single component in your PC is a tough sell for most folks. Luckily, AMD is coming out with its own 6-core processors codenamed Thuban.

Officially branded the Phenom II X6, AMD won’t be launching these processors until some time in the future. But today AMD is disclosing some basic details about the parts. We’re also mixing in our knowledge of internal AMD roadmaps to paint a clear picture of AMD’s 6-core strategy.

Read on!