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Thursday Tech! - Six-Core AMD Phenom II x6

          Finally, AMD is stepping up its game after a long time slumber in the shadows of Intel. Now, it should be known and well noted that I absolutely LOVE Advanced Micro Devices and been a dedicated fan of AMD since K5 series. With this previous fact noted, I will be as unbiased as possible.

          Onto Specs, The “Thuban”, which is code name for the Six-Core series. This series has two chips so far, the 1055T and the 1090T BE; 2.8GHZ 3MB L2 6MB L3 Cache and 3.2 3MB L2 6MB L3 Cache respectivly. Sometime this month, unannounced yet, they will be releasing a secondary 1055T model with the same specs except lower voltage and power requirements. Regardless of all that, they are still all AM3+ certified and ready to be dropped into your year old board :D

Specs for the Phenom II X6 1055T

Specs for the Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition

          Minor changes in the voltage, and the multipler, solely for the “Green” freaks I imagine. Moving on to capability and the reason why we buy AMD. The fine folks at this company have decided “Lets make overclocking easier than we already made it with AMD Overdrive!” and they added the Turbo option, which comes in the latest AMD Overdrive utility. What it does is this, 6 cores drops down to 3 in a way that clocks down 3 of the 6, and boosts up the other 3. No this doesn't get you more L2/L3 cache, no this doesn't lessen your power consumption. You're just using a SixShooter(as I call them) as an overclocked Triplecore. Now now, most of you are probably saying “Well why the hell did I buy a Sixcore processor if its going to 'Turbo' to a Triplecore processor”. Hey...smarty panties, you don't HAVE to use their Turbo function. You can overclock all 6 by yourself if you know what you're doing, and if you're going to be overclocking you damn well should! It is not for the faint of heart, I've seen people freak out pretty bad when they got their first BSOD while overclocking lol.

          Next up, Performance. Based off of ExtremeOverclocking.com's results these two compete well with the Intel Core i7's. Favoring in the fields of multiprocessor based applications and rendering. While the SixShooters did hold up their own, the scores did not always reflect as one would hope. For example, Far Cry 2 1680x1050 Ranch Small on very high settings, the Phenom II x4 965 3.4 GHZ scored at 71 while the i7 920 2.67 did 70, and the 1090T came in third with 69. -sadface- But something like Folding @ Home, the 1090T came out on top with 1352 projected points per day, and the Core i7 920 2.67 GHz came short in second with 1283.

          After overclocking, they've posted results with a bit of a surprise to me in store. The 1090T overclocked(all six cores) to 3.8 at 1.45V stable on air, and they matched it up with the i7 920 at 3.8 as well. They faired pretty evenly across the board(ExtremeOverclockingPg15)

          Yes yes, the 920 is a quadcore, not a hexacore, but considering you're paying the price of a quadcore Intel for a hexacore AMD, you're still getting a better deal. Also reflect with me, how many games do we actively play that actually use MCP? um...maybe 2? I personally don't have one lol. But I could run a server on one of them and go crazy with flashing my server off to everyone just to say I have it. For now, Intel still wins in performance, but in price? No, AMD takes that cake, and eats it too since you just buy the new SixShooter into your AM3 socket (which isn't going anywhere anytime soon), upgrade your bios, and done! An Intel chip, as stated by ExtremeOverclocking, usually requires a new board, which means new memory, and a new heatsink. All of that together adds up.

          In the end, you go with what you know. You put up that stiff upper lip and continue on with AMD even though their Sixshooter lacks in comparison to Intel's knowing in your heart that one day AMD will regain reign over the microprocessor market or you stay with Intel because Mommy buys you everything you want except you don't deserve a retarded expensive Mac, not that you'd want one lol.