Advanced Micro Devices on Tuesday introduced two new Phenom II central processing units (CPUs) in time for enthusiasts' Christmas shopping. Among the two chips is AMD's highest-end offering to-date, the six-core processor with 3.30GHz clock-speed with TurboCore technology, as well as AMD's fastest dual-core chip for overclockers.

The world's second largest supplier of x86 microprocessors formally introduces the new microprocessors in time for the Holiday shopping season and indeed the new chips are already available in select stores in the U.S. The introduction of new products inevitably triggered price-drop onto earlier released CPUs and they got a little more affordable than they were.

One of the chips introduced Tuesday is the six-core AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition, which is clocked at 3.30GHz (3.70GHz with TurboCore when half of the cores are idle), has 3MB L2 cache (512KB per core), 6MB L3 cache as well as dual-channel DDR3 memory controller. The microprocessor has 125W thermal design power and is designed for AM3 platforms.

With the introduction of the Phenom II X6 1100T BE central processing unit AMD once again gives enthusiasts a signal that it had focused on speeding-up its chips with highest amount of cores and not rolling-out high-frequency chips with lower amount of processing engines. While default clock-speed of 3.30GHz is still lower compared to 3.50GHz of quad-core Phenom II X4 970 BE, the TurboCore speed of the 1100T is 3.70GHz, which should  enable higher performance in single-threaded or dual-threaded applications.

Another chip that AMD rolled-out on the 7th of December is the dual-core Phenom II X2 565 Black Edition processor with 3.40GHz clock-speed, 1MB L2, 6MB L3 and 80W thermal envelope. The processor is clearly aimed at overclockers since it has unlocked multiplier as well as relatively low TDP, which should allow easy speed up of the chip to much higher frequencies.

AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition and AMD Phenom II X2 565 Black Edition are priced at $265 and $112, respectively, in 1000-unit quantities.

It is worth mentioning that the company for some reason decided to postpone the launch of its six-core AMD Phenom II X6 1065T (2.90GHz) chip, which would be AMD's fastest six-core offering with 95W thermal design power; as well as quad-core AMD Phenom II X4 975 (3.60GHz) microprocessor, the firm's speediest product with four engines.

Tags: AMD, Phenom, Thuban, Leo, 45nm, Zosma, Deneb