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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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 reviewhttp://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