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
3dsmax 9 - SPECapc 3dsmax CPU Rendering Test
Today's desktop processors are more than fast enough to do professional level 3D rendering at home. To look at performance under 3dsmax we ran the SPECapc 3dsmax 8 benchmark (only the CPU rendering tests) under 3dsmax 9 SP1. The results reported are the rendering composite scores.
Not all heavily threaded workloads will show the Phenom II X6 in a good light. Here Intel maintains the advantage:
Cinebench R10
Created by the Cinema 4D folks we have Cinebench, a popular 3D rendering benchmark that gives us both single and multi-threaded 3D rendering results.
Single threaded performance is obviously an Intel advantage, but crank up the thread count and there's no match for the Phenom II X6. As we pointed out earlier, if you've got a lot of CPU intensive threads there's no replacement for more cores.
POV-Ray 3.73 beta 23 Ray Tracing Performance
POV-Ray is a popular, open-source raytracing application that also doubles as a great tool to measure CPU floating point performance.
I ran the SMP benchmark in beta 23 of POV-Ray 3.73. The numbers reported are the final score in pixels per second.
Once again, the Phenom II X6 does very well here.
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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