AMD's Six-Core Phenom II X6 1090T & 1055T Reviewed
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 27, 2010 12:26 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- AMD
- Phenom II X6
The Performance Summary
At $199 and $285 the obvious comparison points are Intel’s Core i5 750 and Core i7 860. We’ll dive into the complete performance tests in a bit, but if you’re looking for some quick analysis here’s what we’ve got.
Single threaded performance is squarely a Lynnfield advantage. Intel’s quad-cores can turbo up more and Intel does have the advantage of higher IPC.
| Phenom II X6 vs. Intel's Lynnfield Processors | |||||||
| Cinebench R10 (Single Threaded) | Cinebench R10 (Multithreaded) | 3dsmax r9 | x264 HD - 2nd Pass | Left 4 Dead | |||
| AMD Phenom II X6 1090T | 3951 | 18526 | 13.7 | 28.5 fps | 127.2 fps | ||
| AMD Phenom II X6 1055T | 3547 | 16268 | 12.7 | 25.1 fps | 111.5 fps | ||
| Intel Core i7 860 | 4490 | 16598 | 15.0 | 26.8 fps | 131.0 fps | ||
| Intel Core i5 750 | 4238 | 14142 | 13.4 | 21.0 fps | 130.0 fps | ||
Highly threaded encoding and 3D rendering performance are obviously right at home on the Phenom II X6. The 6MB L3 cache and lower IPC does appear to hamper the Phenom II X6 in a couple of tests but for the most part if you need threads, the X6 is the way to go.
Applications in between generally favor Intel’s quad-cores over the Phenom II X6. This includes CPU-bound games.
None of this should be terribly surprising as it’s largely the same conclusion we came to with the Athlon II X3 and X4. If you run specific heavily threaded applications, you can’t beat the offer AMD is giving you. It’s the lighter or mixed use workloads that tend to favor Intel’s offerings at the same price points.
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silverblue - Thursday, April 29, 2010 - link
I agree. If it's a struggle to utilise all six cores at 100%, just add another program to the mix. This may just prove once and for all if a physical Stars core can beat a logical i- core, and thus whether AMD were right to launch Thuban in the first place.Scali - Friday, April 30, 2010 - link
I'll say a few things to that...A physical Stars core actually has to beat TWO logical i-cores. After all, we have 6 Stars cores vs 8 logical i-cores.
So if we were to say that the 4 physical cores on both are equal (which they're not, because the i-cores have an advantage), that leaves 2 physical cores against 4 logical cores.
Another thing is that if you have to work hard to set up a multitasking benchmark that shows Thuban in a favourable light, doesn't that already prove the opposite of what you are trying to achieve?
I mean, how realistic is it for a consumer processor to set up Virtual Box/VMWare benchmarks? Doesn't that belong in the server reviews (where as I recall, AMD's 6-cores couldn't beat Intel's 8 logical cores either in virtualization benchmarks)?
Virtualization is not something that a consumer processor needs to be particularly good at, I would say. Gaming, video processing, photo editing. Now those are things that consumers/end-users will be doing.
wyvernknight - Thursday, April 29, 2010 - link
@mapesdhsTheres no such thing as an AM3 board with DDR2. Only an AM2+ board with DDR2 that has AM3 support. The MA770-UD3 you gave as an example is an AM2+ board with AM3 compatibility. "Support for Socket AM3 / AM2+ / AM2 processors". AM3 boards do not have support for AM2+ and AM2 processors.
mapesdhs - Thursday, April 29, 2010 - link
Strange then that the specs pages specifically describe the sockets as being AM3.
Ian.
Skyflitter - Thursday, April 29, 2010 - link
Could someone please tell me the difference between the Phenom II X6 1090T & 1055T.I would like to put one of these new chips into my Gigabyte DDR2 MB but the Gigabyte web site says my board only supports the 1035T and the 1055T chips. My board is rated @ 140 W. ( GA-MA770-UD3 )
I am currently running a Athlon 64 x2 6400+ ( 3.4Ghz ) and I do not want to loose to much clock speed by going with 1055T ( 2.8 Ghz ).
Do all the new Phenom II X6 support DDR2?
cutterjohn - Friday, April 30, 2010 - link
I'm waiting for them to cough up a new arch that delivers MUCH better per-core performance.There is just no value proposition with their 6 core CPU that mostly matches a 5 core i7 920 which can be had for a roughly similar pricepoint, i.e. i7 930 $199 @ MicroCenter.
Either way unless I win the giveaway :D, I'm now planning at least until next year to upgrade the desktop to see how Sandy Bridge comes out and IF AMD manages to get out their new CPU. I figure that I may as well wait now for the next sockets LGA2011 for Intel, and what I'm sure will be a new one for AMD with their new CPU. As an added bonus I'll be skipping the 1st generation of DX11 hw, as new architectures to support new APIs DX11/OGL4 tend to not be quite the best optimized or robust, especially apparently in nVidia's case this time. (Although AMD had an easier time of it as they made few changes from R7XX to R8XX as is usual for them. AMD need to really start spending some cash on R&D if they wish to remain relevant.)
silverblue - Friday, April 30, 2010 - link
The true point of the X6 is heavy multi-tasking. I'd love to see a real stress test thrown at these to show what they can do, and thus validate their existence.pow123 - Wednesday, May 5, 2010 - link
You would have to be insane to pay $1000 for a chip that may be good for gaming. at $199 with slightly lower performance its a no brainer. When I build a system, I don't care if the frame rates etc is 10 to 15% better. Who cares ; the chip is fast and I have not problems playing high end games. I have no special setup and it does everything that my friends I7 can do. Good for me I get more pc for the buck . Go ahead and go broke buying just a motherboard and cpu when I can get a modern motherboard a cpu, 6gigs of ddr3 1600, a 1tb hd and a dvdrw. More for me.spda242 - Sunday, May 2, 2010 - link
I would really like to have seen a World of Warcraft test with there CPUs like you did with the Intel 6-core.It would be interesting to see if WoW can use all Core's and to what performance.
hajialibaig - Wednesday, May 5, 2010 - link
Not sure why there is no Power vs. Performance vs. Price comparison of the different processors. As for the performance, it could be anything that you want, such as Gaming Performance or Video Encoding.Such a comparison should be interesting, since you may as well pay back the higher initial price via power savings.