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
SYSMark 2007 Performance
Our journey starts with SYSMark 2007, the only all-encompassing performance suite in our review today. The idea here is simple: one benchmark to indicate the overall performance of your machine.
SYSMark really taxes two cores most of the time, giving the edge to Lynnfield and its aggressive turbo modes. Lightly threaded or mixed workloads won't do so well on the Phenom II X6.
Adobe Photoshop CS4 Performance
To measure performance under Photoshop CS4 we turn to the Retouch Artists’ Speed Test. The test does basic photo editing; there are a couple of color space conversions, many layer creations, color curve adjustment, image and canvas size adjustment, unsharp mask, and finally a gaussian blur performed on the entire image.
The whole process is timed and thanks to the use of Intel's X25-M SSD as our test bed hard drive, performance is far more predictable than back when we used to test on mechanical disks.
Time is reported in seconds and the lower numbers mean better performance. The test is multithreaded and can hit all four cores in a quad-core machine.
Performance here is good, but even Photoshop doesn't make consistent enough use of all six cores to really give the Phenom II X6 the edge it needs here. It's faster than the Phenom II X4, but not faster than the Core i5 750.
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Calin - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link
Unfortunately in my experience, antivirus seems hard-drive limited even on Conroe dual core processors.kmmatney - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link
I would agree. Going to an SSD will probably make more difference than adding more cores, when it comes to everyday multitasking.KaarlisK - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link
You're lucky, both MSE and AVG usually hit 100% of one core both for my 1.8 and 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duos.Taft12 - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link
Frankly, the list of apps you provide would run just fine on a single-core CPU.beginner99 - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link
yep, like on my netbook with a z520 atom. AVG + utorrent + FF or chrome no issue (unless of course hd flash movies but that's another story).On my desktop (which is also a pretty old and crappy e4300) i also have seti@home. so basically i'm always at 100% cpu but still feel the hdd is limiting.
Scali - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 - link
Yes it makes sense... things like browsers, IM, email don't take a lot of CPU. They can easily be juggled by the OS on just a single core (or with hardware, using HT).More processes don't necessarily require more cores.
I mean, I am currently running two instances of Visual Studio, a browser with 10 tabs open, Skype, Spark, Notepad++, Outlook and a few other small things in the tray or background, and my dualcore still is at 1% CPU usage, according to Task Manager, and that 1% CPU is Task Manager itself. So why would I want 4 cores, let alone 6?
It really doesn't matter.
eekamouse - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link
I think there is something really good that could be tested here, the performance of these chips running virtual machines especially with hypervisor technology..Any possibility of testing these chips running either xen or vmware and seeing how 4 virtual machines react on each and how 6 react ? is the performance stable etc ? The reason I ask this is for the price point if it can run 6 virtual machines all running off of their own core or sharing cores and can maintain a good performance, it would be really worthwhile investing in these for cheap virtualisation servers..
rickcain2320 - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link
That's all you need to know. Time to ditch my Q6600.fitten - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link
Well... we haven't seen the consumer priced hex-core Intel parts yet... Everybody is comparing this to the high-end Intel parts (i7-980X is a high-end part). I'll wait to see what Intel's response is before removing them from the table.formulav8 - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link
Enjoy! the waiting game... I still doubt Intel would lower prices near AMD's 6 core do to the fact that they will be ruining their much more profitable mainstream parts.Jason