Annoyed that the six-core sever-bound Opterons we saw in July couldn’t go in your standard computer? Not to worry, as it looks like AMD is preparing some six-core consumer processors, codenamed “Thuban”, that should still fit in your AM3/AM2+ socket motherboard. I wonder if they’ll be better than Intel’s Core i7 line-up…
Anyway, the new CPU pushes six-cores onto the single 45nm die along with a DDR3 memory controller and 3MB of L2/6MB of L3 cache. It is also estimated that the chip will pack a whopping 904 million transistors, or around 173 million more transistors than Intel’s Core i7-975. However, these processors aren’t expected until next year and will probably launch after Intel launches its Core i9 range packing 6 cores, 12 threads and the LGA 1366 socket.