M5A78L/USB3 unleashing the Phenom II X6 1075T

[halgol60]

I have a Phenom II X6 1075T which is currently on a M5A78L/USB3 and BIOS was showing 6 Cores, as expected.

Then I tried the "unleash" option in the BIOS of the M5A78L/USB3. The BIOS then shows 8 cores!

What is it I am seeing? I tried getting ASUS tech support to explain this to me, but I got cut off their live chat just in a nick of time...before I could read the entire response, which was written in a dialect of English that was not easy to understand.

It seems these extra 2 cores are "logical" cores, according to the tech. But that leaves me wondering: What are the 6 cores I was seeing before the unleashing? Are those ALSO "logical" cores, or are they called something else?

I'd appreciate some help on the nomenclature here because the explanations I've been getting hits on around the Internet are not very clear to me.

 

[Petrossa]

Hi there
Those 6 cores you see are 6 actual, physical processing cores. Logical cores would refer to "virtual" cores (think hyper threading for Intel cpus).
Not sure where you got the 2 extra "cores" from though. Perhaps your cpu came with 2 cores disabled to make it a 6 core cpu and the unleash feature somehow unlocks them.

 

[halgol60]

What I've read (and been told) is that no phenom (thuban?) has ever been made with 8 cores. I DID hear, once, though that a variant was made that had a couple extra cores for some kind of graphics processing, but I am not sure if that applies to this particular processor.

Thank you for your answer. I hope others will offer their knowledge on this topic as well.