Power Consumption

Most impressive is AMD's ability to run six 45nm cores at the same power consumption as four 45nm cores. The Phenom II architecture in general does reasonably well at idle, but without power gating AMD can't compete with Intel's idle power levels.

Under load Intel also has the clear advantage.

Idle Power Consumption

Gaming Performance Overclocking
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  • Scali - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 - link

    I think people buying an Extreme Edition CPU know exactly what they're getting themselves into.
    Those CPUs are never good price/performance, you pay a premium to get the absolute fastest CPU on the market, that's the whole point of the Extreme Edition concept.

    Obviously Intel isn't going to offer only one expensive 32nm six-core forever. Perhaps this X6 CPU will trigger Intel to release more 'mainstream' six-cores and other 32nm CPUs.
  • JGabriel - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link

    For home use, yes. For professional use, that 48.8 frames/second on the 980x vs. 28.5 on the 1090T, for x264 2nd pass encoding, looks quite justifiable. If that's your business, that'll pay for itself in a couple of weeks.

    .
  • pjconoso - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link

    Point taken. I was speaking for home users. ;)
  • pow123 - Wednesday, May 5, 2010 - link

    Exactly. A few seconds. I will not pay for an over priced processor for a few seconds. Keep it coming AMD.
  • Lolimaster - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link

    Watch tom's review
    http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-phenom-ii-...

    More justice to the AMD cpu's. Just pass the synthetic intel compiler bugged benchmarks.
  • haplo602 - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link

    Actualy the results are what I expected and what was also explained in the review. Not stellar, but very good for the money spent ...

    I guess I'll buy one of the 4-cores.
  • Hacp - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link

    Anand, why do you not try to push the chip on overclocking? Also, why not do an I7 overclocked vs Phenom X6 overclocked performance comparison? Overall, I feel that this review was pretty limited and unenthusiastic for such an exciting product.
  • ymetushe - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link

    Second this. I was really hoping you'd do some overclocked benchmarks, say at 4GHz, so that we could see clock for clock performance of 6 Thuban cores vs. 8 Bloomfield/Lynfield threads.
  • JGabriel - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link

    Check the x264 and Cinebench results. Clock for clock, at 2.8 Ghz, two hyper-threaded Lynnfield cores seems to match three Thuban cores - at least for rendering & encoding purposes.

    .
  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link

    I try to provide a look at what sort of headroom you can get out of the chip while feeding it as little voltage as possible. The idea is to keep power consumption at a minimum while increasing performance. I found that the jump from 3.8 to 3.9GHz required quite a bit of additional voltage, while just going to 3.8GHz was basically a non-issue - which to me is more impressive than trying to squeeze another 100 - 200MHz out of the chip.

    Take care,
    Anand

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