AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Review - PAGE 1

The Phenom II X4 965 has been holding flagship status over at AMD since August last year and now the company is finally bringing their hexacore chip to the desktop. In fact, servers have had access to AMD's 6-core processors for nearly a year now. These Opteron's, codenamed Istanbul, have a slightly different feature set although they share most of their design elements. Today's center of interest is codenamed Thuban and will show up on the shelves as the Phenom II X6 1090T.

Unlike Intel's Core i7-980X, a quick glance at the name tells at least part of the story -- we're looking at a 6-core part. Another even more interesting difference? The Phenom II X6 processors will sell for about a fourth of the price. Clocked at 2.8 GHz, the 1055T and its $199 MSRP is especially attractive. Our sample, the 1090T, comes clocked at 3.2 GHz and should retail for about $285. We'll see how they stack up in terms of performance,but both of these sound like an incredible value.

Let's check out AMD's current Phenom II lineup to see how today's chips stack up.

Thuban is built on AMD's, or rather GlobalFoundries, 45nm manufacturing process and each core is cirtually identical to those in current Phenom II's. With 50% more cores comes an additional 50% L1 and L2 cache, but otherwise you're looking at the same specifications. While it's great that AMD was able to keep the TDP under control at 125W, the processor's cores now have to share that same 6MB of L3 cache with the two newcomers so that might affect performance negatively during heavy loads.

The Phenom II X6 is also AMD's first new die since the Phenom II X4 955 and although they won't publicly divulge its transistor count, they released die size and it happens to be the exact same as Istanbul, the hexacore server processor released almost a year ago. Clever minds that we are, we quickly looked up on Istanbul and found out it has just a tad over 900 million, so there we go.

Noticed that T in 1055T and 1090T? It designates Turbo CORE which is AMD's take at improving single threaded performance. However, there are a few caveats to their implementation. First of all, three or more cores must be idle before the processor can fire up turbo. This limitation is in place to make sure the TDP never exceeds 125W. There's also only a single level so either it's in full blown Turbo or not at all. Lastly, core voltage is increased in order to remain stable.

It is not as refined as Intel's Turbo Boost, however, AMD has another ace up their sleeve -- Turbo CORE is fully configurable through OverDrive. It is in fact possible to change the number of idle cores at while it will trigger, the clock multiplier to use and core voltage. This is a definite advantage if you are into tweaking.

Thuban, Lynnfield and Gulftown dies (to scale)

AMD's pricing strategy is awesome for the consumer, in that there is no doubt. Where it hurts though, is at their own bottomline and Thuban alleviates this issue, but doesn't entirely solve it. The problem lies in the fact that Thuban still is larger (the image above is to scale) and thus costs more to manufacture than both Lynnfield and Gulftown. I don't want to rain on AMD's party, but nothing is stopping Intel from cutting prices overnight or introducing a new part. We shall see what the future brings. Either way, competition is great for us.

Even though the Phenom II X6 will work in a whole bunch -- AMD claims over 160 -- of AM2 and AM3 motherboards currently on the market with a simple BIOS update, they are also releasing a new chipset in tandem with the new processors -- 890FX. This is the high end, enthusiast follow-up to the 890GX. The integrated graphics are ditched in favor of IOMMU and a slew of PCI-Express 2.0 lanes. The former comes from the server world and is primarily useful in virtualized workloads, but requires support from the operating system which isn't available in consumer versions of Windows.

The latter is a lot more interesting for us. With 890FX, motherboards have 44 PCI-Express 2.0 lanes at their disposal. The defacto configuration for video cards goes as follows: four full length slots running at 16x with one or two video cards or 8x if three or four are installed. The remaining lanes can be used for 1x or 4x slots as well as other onboard devices such as a USB 3.0 chip.

Without any further ado, let's check out what AMD has cooked up for us today.