AMD plans to retire all the six-core Phenom II processors that the company currently has in its lineup by the end of the year in order to make room for the upcoming FX-Series chips that are based on the new, high-performance Bulldozer architecture.
The first processors to be retired will be the Phenom II X6 1045T, 1055T and 1065T, which can be ordered until the third quarter of this year.These are going to be followed by the rest of the company's Phenom II X6 CPU lineup, which includes no less than five chips, that can be ordered until the end of the year.Orders for all processors will be shipped until the first quarter of 2012 ends.All of these CPUs are based on AMD's Thuban architecture which was launched in April of 2010, and include six K10 processing cores. These are paired together with 512KB of Level 2 cache memory per core, a shared 6MB L3 cache, an integrated memory controller that supports DDR3-1333 DIMMs and their operating frequencies ranges between 2.6 and 3.3 GHz.Thuban was also AMD's first architecture to support the Turbo Core technology, which automatically adjusts the speed of the cores depending on the load placed on them, and were able to reach clock speeds up to 3.6GHz in this mode.The Phenom II X6 chips will be replaced with new FX-Series processors based on the Bulldozer architecture, which are going to be launched in August or September of 2011, according to the company.Unlike the company's previous designs, including Thuban, Bulldozer will use a new approach that relies on a modular architecture. Each module includes two processing cores, as well as other components, and these can be paired together to form CPUs with up to eight computing cores.
