While AMD will be releasing its 6-core Thuban processors soon – the Phenom II X6 family – it will bring out its Thuban-based Zosma range as well, under the family name of Phenom II X4 “T”. The Phenom II X4 960T & 940T will therefore hopefully keep the same basic features of the Thuban family, i.e., 6MB of L3 cache and the new Turbo facility. Note: the Phenom II X4 “T” family differs from the earlier Phenom II X4 family (such as the X4 965 and 925) because it’s based on the Thuban architecture, and not the Deneb.
The Phenom II X4 960T will have a clock-speed of 3.3GHz on each core, while the 940T will have a clock-speed of 3Ghz, and both have a TDP rating of 95W. As you might remember, the combination of Deneb Phenom II X2 or X3 processors and a SB710 or SB750 chipset allowed the additional (all Deneb-based processors have 4 cores) disabled cores to be “unlocked”. In other words, if you had an SB710 or SB750 chipset, you could “unlock” 1 extra core on Phenom II X3 processors, or 2 extra cores on the Phenom II X2 processors. While “unlocking” has possible disadvantages resulting from enabling a core that was disabled because it was unstable or not up to the mark, if you are lucky, you could get 1 or 2 extra cores worth of parallel processing with unlocking.
The Phenom II X4 960T and 940T will also fall under the same category of “unlockable”, where the extra 2 cores can be unlocked with the correct combination of chipset and processor. Here’s hoping that the chipset that can do this is made available by AMD, or is something that is already available, such as the SB750.