AMD Phenom II X6 1090T and 1055T Six-Core Processor Review

AMD Phenom II X6 Processors Arrive

The long awaited AMD Phenom II X6 processors have finally arrived and AMD officially has 6-core desktop processors on the market! AMD today released their new flagship desktop processors that feature six processor cores, but that is not all! The have also rolled out a new frequency boosting technology called AMD Turbo CORE that is available on these new ‘Thuban’ processors, a brand new chipset that goes by the name of 890 FX for high-end motherboards.

The new AMD Phenom II X6 processors, AMD 8-series chipsets, and ATI Radeon HD 5800 series cards make up what is called the ‘Leo’ platform and is said to be the ultimate AMD platform for power users. Today, our focus will be on the new AMD Phenom II X6 processors as we have the AMD Phenom II X6 1090T processor in-house and have been pounding away on it for the past several days.

AMD Phenom II X6 Processor Lineup
CPU	Clock Speed	Turbo Clock	L3 Cache	TDP	Price
AMD Phenom II X6 1090T	3.2GHz	3.6GHz	6MB	125W	$285
AMD Phenom II X6 1075T	3.0GHz	3.5GHz	6MB	125W	–
AMD Phenom II X6 1055T	2.8GHz	3.3GHz	6MB	125W/95W	$199
AMD Phenom II X6 1035T	2.6GHz	3.1GHz	6MB	95W	–
AMD Phenom II X4 960T	3.0GHz	3.4GHz	6MB	95W	–

AMD is supposed to be coming out with a number of 6-core processors in the coming months, but today they have officially announced the Phenom II X6 1090T (HDT90ZFBK6DGR) and the Phenom II X6 1055T (HDT55TFBK6DGR). The chart above shows some of the rumored processors that will be coming out. AMD only sent us the Phenom II X6 1090T processor, but we will be down clocking it to Phenom II X6 1055T speeds and benchmarking that as well to see how it fairs against processors like the Intel Core i7 930.

The AMD 890 FX chipset is basically superior to the AMD 890 GX chipset
in the sense that it has been stripped of the integrated graphics (IGP)
and has two full x16 PCI Express lanes for better performance for those
that have multi-GPU CRossFire graphics configurations. Both the 890GX
and 890FX chipsets have the primary PCIe graphics card location as a x16
slot when one video card is used, but when two video cards are used the
890GX chipset reduces the number of lanes down to just eight on the
slot.

The AMD Phenom II X6 1090T CPU is AMDs fastest and most powerful desktop processor ever. It has six real 45nm cores of processing power that operate at 3.2GHz under full load. If the CPU finds itself in a condition where 3 or more cores are idle, the processor can use Turbo CORE technology to boost the active 3 cores to 3.6GHz improving performance on less heavily-threaded workloads.

Cache Sizes L1 Cache:

• 128KB (64KB Instruction + 64KB Data) x6(six-core)
• L2 Cache: 512KB x6(six-core)
• L3 Cache: 6MB Shared L3

Process Technology: 45-nanometer SOI (silicon-on-insulator) technology
HyperTransport technology links: One 16-bit/16-bit link at up to 4000MT/s full duplex; or up to 16.0GB/s I/O bandwidth
Memory: Integrated memory controller up to 21GB/sec dual channel memory bandwidth
Types of Memory: Support for unregistered DIMMs up to PC2 8500 (DDR2-1066MHz) and PC3 10600 (DDR3-1333MHz)
Die Size: 45nm = 258mm2
Packaging: 938-pin organic micro Pin Grid Array (micro-PGA)

Let’s take a closer look at Turbo CORE technology and take a look at the benchmarks!