AMD Phenom II X6 1090T
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AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Reviews
AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition review
Welcome back AMD, we've missed you. With the launch of the Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition a few months ago, AMD signalled a revival of its CPU business. The 1090T is based on Thuban, a new six-core chip and easily the best processor design from AMD in years.Admittedly, it's not an all-new CPU. It's mostly a six-core rehash of AMD's existing 45nm quad-core architecture, known as Deneb. Of course, Deneb was essentially a 45nm respin of AMD's 65nm Barcelona chip. Rinse and repeat right back to the original Hammer core from 2003.Still, you only have to look at the Phenom II X6 1090T BE's power rating to appreciate what AMD has achieved. This six-core, 45nm, 3.2GHz chip is rated at 125 Watts. The quad-core, 45nm, 3.4GHz Phenom II X4 965 Black Editionweighs in at 140 Watts. Clearly, AMD has at last got to grips with the 45nm production node. With six cores humming a 3.2GHz tune, you'd expect the Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition to sport decent multi-threading chops. You'd be right. If there's a cheaper chip that offers better performance in video encoding and other highly parallelised applications, we haven't seen it.
AMD Phenom II X6 1090T review
At the Pentium 4's press launch, Intel talked confidently about future versions reaching 10GHz. Oh dear, now we know better. The path to performance lies with multiple core chips. Intel started the trend and where Intel goes, AMD isn't too far behind - and does it cheaper. On the tail of the Intel Core i7 980X we now have AMD's own six-core offering based on the new Thuban core. The first two versions are the 1055T running at 2.8GHz, and what we have here: the 1090T, running at 3.2GHz. The 'T' is for Turbo, AMDs new Turbo CORE technology which boosts performance on selected cores to 3.3 and 3.6Ghz respectively - we'll tell you more about that below. Now lets get a little technical. What we have here is pretty much a four-core Deneb. It's made using a 45nm process and each core gets the same 512KB L2 cache, sitting on this is 6MB of L3 cache. There's no extra over the four-core Phenom here, unlike Intel's 980X whose two extra cores come replete with extra L3. The Thermal Design Power of 125W tells us the limits aren't being stretched excessively, desktop processors have a practical limits of around 140-150W TDP. The memory controller offers two channel DDR3, rather than Intel's triple channel.
Phenom II X6 1090T
When Intel released its first-ever six-core (or hexa-core) processor in early March, we already knew at the time that it wouldn't be too long before AMD hit the scene with its own six-core models. This was reassuring, because as things have gone for AMD on the CPU side lately, it's been hard to predict just how far the company could fall behind the "Sponsors of Tomorrow". It's one thing to match Intel with a six-core product, but it's another to deliver the same kind of performance. Based off of what we've seen with Phenom II models up to this point, it was easy to surmise what kind of performance gains we'd see with an X6 chip. It's clear that the performance won't match up evenly, but AMD would certainly win from a value aspect. That aspect is one thing AMD is highlighting pretty heavily with this launch. While Intel offers only a single six-core processor, the Core i7-980X Extreme Edition at $999, AMD states that you could save a lot of money by buying one of its processors and building a PC around it. Think about it for a moment. The X6 1090T is $299, an ATI Radeon HD 5870 is $399 and a sweet AM3 890FX motherboard is at most $199. That's about $900... still less than Intel's only six-core offering by itself. Intel's six-core aside, the fairest competition to the X6 1090T is the Core i7-930, a quad-core offering.
AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition
Forget about 2010 being the Year of the Tablet: It more appropriately needs to be called the Year of Six. First came Intel's six-core "Gulftown" Core i7-980X CPU, which redefined the top of Intel's processor lineup. Then there was AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity6 Edition video card, which could drive up to half a dozen monitors at once. Now AMD is also meeting up with Intel on the boxcars with the release of its own new family of six-core CPUs: the Phenom II X6. Though a few details about the new family were released last month, the chips themselves make their debut today, crowning off the performance segment of AMD's own CPU lines. (The others, in descending order of power, are the X4, the X3, and the X2 families.) The inaugural members of this new clan are the Phenom II X6 1055T ($199 list) and the Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition ($285 list). In terms of price and performance, the 1090T (the one we received to test) gives you exactly what AMD has led you to expect in recent years - for better or for worse. (Or at least for cheaper.).
AMD Phenom II X6 1090T & 1055T
While Intel was the first to launch its 6 core processor for desktop PCs, the Core i7-980X, AMD hasn’t allowed itself to be sidelined. The maker of the Athlons did in fact demo such a processor in February 2009 before officially launching it in June 2009. This however was an Opteron, which is to say it was designed for servers and workstations. A little over a month after the launch of the Core i7-980X, AMD is hitting the market with its own 6-core designed for desktop PCs, the Phenom II X6! The first rumours about the Thuban began circulating in September 2009. The Phenom II X6 which is launched today is very much like the Phenom II X4, except of course that it has 2 additional cores. There is, then, an L1 cache of 128 KB and an L2 of 512 KB per core, with a shared L3 cache of 6 MB. The surface of the die is up from 258 mm² to 346 mm² however, and the number of transistors up from 758 million to 904 million, all manufactured on the 45nm process. To give you a comparison, the 45nm Bloomfield measures 263 mm² for 731 million transistors, against 248 mm² and 1.17 billion transistors for the Gufltown, engraved at 32nm.
AMD Phenom II X6 1090T BE & Phenom II X6 1055T Review
Those of you that carry out heavily threaded tasks such as intensive 3D work, video encoding, or Excel modeling would have marked down March 2010 as this was when Intel released their first desktop hexa-core processor. Backed with Hyper-Threading support, the Core i7 980X provides 12 working threads that grant considerable performance gains over its quad-core siblings in a number of applications. Furthermore, by reducing the design process to 32nm, these extra cores and the extra performance come at no additional power expense. This was a lot to get us excited about, but like most Intel Extreme Edition processors the Core i7 980X is a tough sell given its $1,000 list price. If money is no object then the six-core Core i7 980X processor is as good as it gets right now. Conversely, today's announcement from AMD is meant to follow the same trend as with recent Phenom CPU releases. AMD is hoping to offer a more attractive six-core processor by providing their Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition and Phenom II X6 1055T models at far more realistic prices. The Phenom II X6 1090T BE is expected to hit shelves at just under $300, making it three times more affordable than the Core i7 980X. At this price point, this 3.2GHz hexa-core AMD processor will be sitting alongside the Core i7 930 and Core i7 860 from Intel.
AMD Phenom II X6 1090T
AMD has a new flagship processor labeled the Phenom II X6 1090T. The 1090T is the most powerful and vestal ever from AMD. The additional cores are always welcomed, though most applications are just written or oeoptimized” for Dual cores as seen in several benchmarks in previous reviews, but keep in mind, these are synthetic benchmarks to record specific tasks on every system. The new Phenom " II X6 1090T processor runs at 3.2GHz natively across all six cores, but when the processor detects that three or more cores are idle, the processor auto boost the three cores to automatically to 3.6GHz. AMD continues to trend of keeping the price low, the 1090T will be listed under $300, which is a welcomed site to see in present economy. Along with the release of the AMD Phenom" II X6 processors, is the release of the new AMD 890FX chipset which we will also touch on during this review. So let us look at what the additional cores give us by taking a look at the standard benchmarks and some over-clocking of the 3.2GHz X6 processor to see how is matches up against the rest of the market today.
AMD Phenom II X6 1090T 6-Core Processor Review
Way back in November of 2007, AMD unveiled all of the components of the "Spider" platform, which consisted of a Phenom processor, 700-series chipset-based motherboard, and Radeon HD 3800 series graphics. A little over a year later, in January of 2009, AMD completed a refresh of their total platform and dubbed it "Dragon". Similarly, the Dragon platform consisted of an all-AMD processor, chipset, and GPU combo, but this time the Phenom II, a revamped 700-series chipset with a new southbridge, and Radeon HD 4800 series graphics were at the heart of the platform. Do you see a pattern forming, here?If you recalled AMD's platform roll-out plans for the last few years, the new "Leo" platform we'll be showing you in this article may not come as a total surprise. After all, we have already shown you the 890GX chipset, the first in the 800-series. And we've almost lost count of how many Radeon HD 5000-series graphics cards we've featured on these pages. Today, AMD completes the platform picture with the release of a new series of six-core processors, aptly named the Phenom II X6. We should also point out a new enthusiast-class chipset is arriving alongside the Phenom II X6, the 890FX.
Product Survey: Processors
Like the Turbo mode on Intel's CPUs, it allows some cores to run faster when not all of them are in use at once. From its basic frequency of 3.2 GHz, the Phenom II X6 1090T can step up to 3.6 GHz if you only use three of its six cores. It's a very handy capability as it allows you to speed things up in apps that aren't optimised for multi-core processors. When it isn't working hard, the processor doesn't use that much more energy than the Phenom II X4 965. We measured a consumption of 137 W for our whole computer, compared to the 130 W needed by the 965. Intel's six-core CPU, the , required 141 W. We were even more pleasantly surprised when we ramped things up, because at 223 W, the consumption for our whole computer was again comparable to the X4 965. The i7 980X caused a spike of 255 W in the same conditions. Our rating of two stars in this section is very harsh because of how high these figures are, but we're glad to see how reasonable these figures are compared to quad-core CPUs. We can only draw one conclusion from our test results: the Phenom II X6 1090T can't match the Intel Core i7 980X on any measure. The latter is quite simply the faster of the two, and has yet to be beaten.
AMD Phenom II X6 1090T and ASUS Crosshair IV Formula
A few months ago in March 2010 we tested Intel's first consumer 6-core CPU, the Intel i7 980x (Extreme), which turned out to be the computer equivalent of a Ferrari; very fast and very expensive. Today it is AMD's turn to launch consumer 6-core CPU's and they take the opportunity to not only release one CPU but two: the AMD Phenom™ II X6 1055T (2.6 GHz) and the AMD Phenom II X6 1090T (3.2 GHz). In contrast to Intel's fast and expensive chip AMD has continued its path of delivering performance at an affordable price meaning that you will be able to build a complete system with the the AMD Phenom X6 1090T for the same price of a Intel i7 980x. In addition to adding 2 more cores to the Phenom II CPU's design AMD has added a cool new feature that in effect makes the Phenom X6 CPU's two CPU's in one: Turbo Core. In short the CPU can now turn off 3 cores and at the same time raise the frequency of the remaining 3 cores in effect creating a higher clocked 3-core CPU. In addition to releasing the the AMD Phenom™ II X6, AMD also today is releasing the new flagship chipset: the AMD 890FX. With support for USB3, SATA6 as well as 4 PCI-E-slots and great overclockability the chipset is aimed at the enthusiasts.
Prices
| Retailer | Information | Prices | |
|---|---|---|---|
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AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Processor, Black Edition (HDT90ZFBGRBOX) | $270 | See it |
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AMD Phenom II X6 1090T : (8.4/10)
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