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Advanced Micro Devices announced the release of the AMD Phenom II X6 processor and AMD 890FX chipset, intended for high-powered processes such as 3D visualization, on April 27. The company also announced availability for the AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition processor, which it claims as its fastest and most tunable desktop-processor offering.
“With AMD Phenom II X6 processors, discerning customers can build an incredible, immersive entertainment system and content creation powerhouse,” Bob Grim, director of Client Platform Marketing for AMD, wrote in an April 27 statement. “AMD is answering the call for elite desktop PC performance and features at an affordable price.”
AMD Phenom II X6 processors have the ability to switch between Turbo mode, which leverages two or three cores for functions such as running productivity software, and six real cores for what the company calls “core-hungry content creation and immersive 3D applications”-because rendering in three-dimensions is now apparently for more than just movies with nine-foot-tall, spear-brandishing smurfs.
The AMD Phenom II X6 1090T processor runs at 3.2GHz and offers a total of 3MB of L2 cache along with 6MB of L3 cache. The chip offers four processing cores and is built on AMD’s 45-nanometer manufacturing technology. The chip works within a 125-watt thermal envelope.
The processors work with existing AM3 and AM2+ socket motherboards, provided for proper BIOS support, and can be paired with AMD OverDrive 3.2.1 to tune performance. Complementing the AMD Phenom II X6 processor is the AMD 890FX chipset, which “is ready for up to four ATI Radeo HD graphics cards and award winning ATI EyeFinity multiple-display technology.” The AMD 890FX with SB850 chipset includes an SATA 6Gb/s hard drive interface along with Gigabit Ethernet, HyperTransport 3.0 technology, and PCI Express Generation 2.0.
AMD reported $1.57 billion for the first quarter, its second profitable one in a row after 12 consecutive quarters of losses. The company reported sales of more than 6 million graphics units supporting Microsoft’s DirectX 11 technology, and both Acer and Lenovo using AMD chips in their respective servers and notebooks. Overall, AMD’s graphics business experienced 88 percent growth, year-over-year, while its Computing Solutions division grew by 23 percent during the same period.
AMD rival Intel also announced strong first-quarter revenues of $10.3 billion, indicating that consumer appetite for processor-powered devices is perhaps on the rise.