14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that Norway isn't the only country eager to supply its citizens with the Thuban six-core chips from Advanced Micro Devices. Just last week, Amentio.no became one of the first retailers if not the first one to start shipping the 1055T and the 1090T and, while it was expected that AMD would ask the retailer to pull the parts off the site, this did not happen. It seems that AMD may not have anything against its AM3 chips shipping early, an idea apparently confirmed by the same two processors showing up on another online vendor.
Instead of being confined to just one country, the two aforementioned CPUs seem to have become more widely available, now that they have been put up for order (or pre-order) on Amazon.
Currently, only the Phenom II X6 1055T is shipping, but the 1090T is up for pre-order, which means that it shouldn't be long before consumers can get their hands on it.
Consumers up to speed with recent events will likely know that the prime asset of these new CPUs is their dynamic overclocking technology known as the Turbo Core. This technology will dynamically increase the clocks of used cores when three or more cores are unused. When compared with Intel's Core i7-980X, however, the most striking element becomes the chips' prices.
Intel's Gulftown, as an enthusiast CPU, has a price tag of no less $999. This much cash gets end-users a chip with a frequency of 3.33GHz and the Turbo Boost technology, which is somewhat superior to AMD's solution because it can completely shut off unused cores in order to optimize the used ones even further. AMD's chips, however, are much cheaper. In fact, the Phenom II X6 1090T, with a clock of 3.20Ghz, has a price of $324.65, whereas the X6 1055T goes even lower, to $222.29.
AMD's 2.6GHz 1035T (for the less rich enthusiasts) and the 3.0GHz 1075T have not been listed anywhere on the Internet, though it should not take them long to rear their heads. The chip that will take the longest to show up is the 1095T, which should be more powerful than the 1090T and will debut in the fourth quarter.