AMD prepares to challenge Intel’s Gulftown six-core with its own desktop creation codenamed Thuban. According to Wikipedia, Thuban is a „star (or star system) in the constellation of Draco.“

It is well known by now that AMD picks codenames for its CPUs based on the star constellations and this is the only way you can end up with some un-cool codenames such as Deneb, Heka and Callisto.

According to latest plans, AMD plans Thuban for Q2 2010 and we can confirm that this is a six core 45nm CPU with DDR3 1333 support that will fit in AM3 motherboards. The only other known fact is that it will have 6MB cache. To us this looks like Istanbul in AM3 packaging but probably with higher speeds. 

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AMD announces consumer 6-core CPU