AMD has announced through MaximumPC that they are to release a six core CPU (aka hexa-core CPU) to consumers sometime next year. The really good news is that for all those AM3 motherboard users the new CPU dubbed Thuban will be backwards compatible with those motherboards. They might even slot into AM2+ motherboards as well.

AMD's Thuban processor will be the first six core CPU the company has offered to consumers, though they have got a six core Opteron chip doing the rounds for the server market. The chip will feature a single 45nm die with an integrated DDR3 memory controller and have 3MB of L2 cache and 6MB of L3 cache. According to MaximumPC the chip will likely keep the Phenom branding and be known as the Phenom II x6.

There is no word on clock speeds yet, but they aren't expected to be as high as their quad-core counterparts. This is probably due to the shear number of extra transistors and therefore heat the extra two cores provide on the chip; the total number of transistors equate to a whopping 904 million. Just to put that into perspective the original Athlon from just ten years ago had just 22 million transistors, or there about.

Thuban will face stiff competition from Intel as they are expected to release their six core Gulftown chip before AMD can release Thuban. Gulftown is expected to be backwards compatible with existing LGA1366 boards but it will also make use of HyperThreading so the Operating System where possible can make use of twelve processing threads, this could give it a distinct advantage over Thuban. Only the benchmarks will tell us the full story when these to are finally able to be benchmarked side by side. 

AMD Phenom™ Quad-Core Processor Die -
Image copyright Advanced Micro Devices, Inc