AMD announced its admission into the six-core desktop chip market, with its Phenom II X6 chip, which has been code-named Thuban.

This chip, which is manufactured on Global Foundries' 45nm process, which is used in the existing quad-core Phenom IIs as well is similar to AMD's six-core Operton server chips, is designed for the desktop surroundings.

In some respects, AMD's admission is comparable to Intel's Core i7-980X Extreme processor, which is known as Gulftown that had been introduced in the preceding month.

But in other ways, it demonstrates the dissimilar approach that AMD is taking to the market. Whilst Intel is stressing on peak performance and hyper- threading that allows two threads to run on each core, AMD is emphasizing its general chip platform, together with distinct graphics, plus affordability.

The Phenom II X6 should be paired with AMD's 890FX chip set, which adds local support for 6 Gb/second SATA drives, and AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5800 series discrete graphics boards.

The chip set lends support to AMD's Overdrive effectiveness, for over clocking, as well as Black Edition certified high-speed memory.