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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SRivera - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 - link
Applications that will use that much memory and memory bandwidth. Off the top of my head, I can only think of moderate-heavy database use. Too many people tend to look over the 1156 platform over to 1366 because of triple channel memory when in reality, even more heavy gamers, you're just never going to fully utilize that much memory or bandwidth.I run a 4GB system, running games and oodles of apps at the same time, I've never seen my memory jump past 3GB or far past it.
So it really comes down to what your use for a system like the i7 9xx & X58 would be if you will really need the triple channel bandwidth and extra memory.
mapesdhs - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 - link
Uncompressed HD editing easily uses more than 4GB RAM. Anyone using an X58 with a
Quadro card for professional work should definitely have 6GB minimum.
Ian.
LoneWolf15 - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link
Zero. That's the amount you have contributed to this thread.chrnochime - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link
Water closet? Haven't heard that term in YEARS.Peroxyde - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link
For a machine used as a light VM Server, is AMD Thuban better than i5 750 ?Taft12 - Wednesday, April 28, 2010 - link
A light VM server should probably use your old PC in the corner gathering dust.ant_ - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link
I was hoping to see some benchmarks in Battlefield Bad Company 2. I thought Anandtech had added it to the gaming tests. We know the game scales well using a quad core vs a dual. I was curious to see the difference between 4 vs 6 cores.toolonglyf - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link
ya I'm a bit disappointed not seeing it there... I think it would have shown something interestingKranZ - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link
I'd be curious to see how this stands up in the VM tests you did earlier this year. At face value, it seems VMs = more threads and this proc would be of value.Crypticone - Tuesday, April 27, 2010 - link
I noticed the WOW benchmarks are missing from this CPU. Any chance of getting them added to the gaming page?