AMD Phenom II X6 performance overview

AMD today introduced its six-core desktop processors, lets take a look at a couple of reviews to discover how well the new Phenom II X6 series performs. First we head over to AnandTech for a test report of the Phenom II X6 1090T and 1055T. The site concludes little has changed since a couple of months ago, AMD chips offer better value for your money if you run applications that are well threaded, while Intel's Lynnfield will likely offer better value when you're building a more general purpose machine:

Applications like video encoding and offline 3D rendering show the real strengths of the Phenom II X6. And thanks to Turbo Core, you don't give up any performance in less threaded applications compared to a Phenom II X4. The 1090T can easily trump the Core i7 860 and the 1055T can do even better against the Core i5 750.

You start running into problems when you look at lightly threaded applications or mixed workloads that aren't always stressing all six cores. In these situations Intel's quad-core Lynnfield processors (Core i5 700 series and Core i7 800 series) are better buys. They give you better performance in these light or mixed workload scenarios, not to mention lower overall power consumption.

Next is a review from PC Perspective, they conclude this chip is an excellent choice for people who need six cores, but that gamers may be better off with the cheaper Phenom II X2 955 BE or perhaps the Intel Core i5-530.

AMD’s engineers should be quite proud of themselves in terms of controlling TDPs, getting clockspeeds to 3.2 GHz (and above), and implementing Turbo Core in a relatively short period of time. Hitting 125 watts TDP with a 3.2 GHz clockspeed with a large CPU design is something to appreciate. Intel did nearly the same thing with the i7-980X, but that required going down to their 32 nm process node to accomplish. And dare I mention it again? $285 vs. $999 for approximately 90% of the performance.

Is this processor for everyone? Absolutely not. For those that are avid gamers, then perhaps the Phenom II X2 955 BE would be a better option, as it performs quite similarly to the 1090T in games all the while costing almost 1/3 less. The Intel i5-530 is another cost effective option for gamers. But if a user requires the extra power that 6 cores can bring, then there is simply no competition at reasonable prices. Rendering, encoding, compressing, and any other application which is multi-core aware will get a good sized boost from the addition of two extra cores in the Phenom II X6 series of parts.

Our final read is the review from Legit Reviews, they conclude the Phenom II X6 makes AMD competitive with Intel once again in the mainstream market, but they also found that game performance saw little benefits from the additional cores.

The AMD Phenom II X6 processor series has been long needed and has helped narrow the performance gap between AMD and the Intel Core i7 processors by the release of these new 'Thuban' based processors. The addition of the 890FX chipset and even the software updates (AMD Fusion Utility 2.0 for basic performance tuning and easy profile selection and the new AMD OverDrive 3.2.1 Utility) have made AMD a more well-rounded platform. AMD has spent the past several years becoming the company that had budget friendly platforms, but now they have a solid platform. If you think about it, the AMD 890 chipset series is very robust with features like native SATA III 6Gbps and then you top that off with 6-core processors and an ATI Radeon HD 5800 series graphics card and you have a cutting edge system. AMD has done well with the 'Leo' platform and the benchmark results show that.