14 DAY TRIAL // After the Phenom II X4 960T processor has been spotted in retail at the end of June, it now seems like AMD is preparing yet another quad-core part based on the Zosma core as an eBay auction has recently revealed a CPU that is known as the Phenom II X4 950T.
AMD Zosma chips are derived from the Thuban architecture and come with two of the six processing cores, as well as with a part of the L3 cache, disabled, in order to provide users with a more budget-friendly alternative to the company's Phenom II X6 CPUs.
Compared to the regular Phenom II X4 processors based on the Daneb architecture, Zosma parts also feature support for the first generation of AMD's Turbo Core technology, which can dynamically raise the operating speed of half of the CPU cores when the other two remain idle.
Moving to the actual specifications of the chip, the four cores included in the Phenom II X4 950T are run at a base frequency of 2.7GHz (3.2GHz max Turbo) and each of them feature 512KB of L2 cache, which is seconded by 4MB of Level 3 cache memory common to all the cores.
These are fitted inside a 95W TDP and the chip is compatible with most of the AM2+, AM3 and AM3+ boards released until now.
A BIOS update may be required in order for the CPU to be properly recognized by the motherboard.
Since the Zosma core is actually a partially disabled Thuban chip, some of the Phenom II X4 950T processors could be turned into fully-working six-core CPUs by unlocking the two disabled cores.
Outside of the eBay sighting, that listed the CPU at $85, AMD's Phenom II X4 950T was already spotted in a series of mini-tower PC systems built by HP. (CPU-World via ATI-Forum)