Thuban, expectations?

[None]

Since I posted something similar about Nvidia's new line of video cards and the architecture I thought I'd post this about AMD's Phenom II x6 processors.

Well we're expecting them on the 26th of April but it's possible they could come a bit earlier apparently.

I'm personally thinking about picking up a 1090T if they're released at the expected $300USD.

[Iokau]

I'm thinking it will be comparable to the Intel 6 core, but still won't be worth the extra money for gaming. Even i7-920s don't show an increase in modern games today. It'll be interesting to see what it does to Intel's hexa-core prices.

[None]

I'm thinking it will be comparable to the Intel 6 core, but still won't be worth the extra money for gaming. Even i7-920s don't show an increase in modern games today. It'll be interesting to see what it does to Intel's hexa-core prices.

Yeah, it most definitely won't have a significant increase in gaming performance. I'd really like t see it be right up there with the 980X but it's more likely to be more around the middle of the i7's with the 940, but at $300 that's still a $200 - $300 difference between the Phenom II x6 and i7 940 and will definitely have an effect on prices.

When I buy one I'll most likely only ever use two or four cores for games, depending on what I'm playing obviously.


Edit: So leaked benchmarks place the 1090T($300 USD) around the performance of the i7 975 Extreme. The 1055T is around the performance level of the i7 860 at stock.

[None]

I'm bumping this since it's a bit exciting that some people in Hong Kong have already picked these up. Merge this when you see it but I was too lazy to make a new thread.

Edit: The $200-$250 1055T can be overclocked to 3.8 on stock air at 1.425 vcore.

[Nemrod]

As long as developers cannot make games that support 4 cores there's no use in buying 6 core or even 8 core CPUs (coming out late this year I think) if you only have gaming in mind.

The turbo boost technology with the Corei5 and Corei7 was a step in the right direction, but we are a long way off of the 15GHz CPUs, which Intel promised for 2010 some years ago.

I don't think the multi core technology will benefit the gaming industry as much as it does for virtualisations (ESX) and databases.

[None]

This probably won't have an effect on gaming, but it's a big step forward before Bulldozer.

http://hwbot.org/community/submissio...55t_5sec_959ms

Edit: These benchmarks are looking pretty good for AMD. These things are only aboue 3 - 5Celsius higher than the 955 and 965. The 1095T overclocks even further with only small voltage adjustments and multiplier increase.

Edit 2: 1055T @ 4.2ghz on air at 1.426 vcore and idle temp was 28°C, not sure what cooler but that's amazing.

[nwo]

I have no expectations from the actual CPUs themselves. However, I do expect their release to finally make game devs think that they should start optimizing their games to take advantage of more than 2 cores.

[Nixia]

The thing I'm exited about is the turboboost technology. It automatically overclocks 3 cores if the other 3 are idle.

[None]

The thing I'm exited about is the turboboost technology. It automatically overclocks 3 cores if the other 3 are idle.

Intel still has a more sophisticated turbo, but Thuban is still on par at a better price point. An 860 which costs $300 is equal to the 1055T at stock, but the 1055T seems to overclock better.

Edit: I might as well mention that the i5 is completely uncompetitive at this point unless they can lower their price to around $160 but even then you can't beat the fact that these will work in any existing AM3 motherboard provided the manufacturer offers a bios update. Gigabyte, Biostar, ECS, and MSI are the only companies that I know have a bios update for the older 7xx chipset motherboards.

[Nixia]

I still think that 6 cores is a bit overkill. Even the i3 is more then enough for any game on max settings, as for programs, the only programs I use are Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Firefox and spotify and non of these are very CPU demanding (maybe photoshop is but not what I've noticed).

[Cilraaz]

The 6/8 core CPUs may not improve gaming performance, but for those who do video/audio editing they are a god-send.

Plus, as nwo said, maybe it'll start waking up a few more developers.

[edit: Oh, and ding post #1000, lol.]

[None]

I doubt these are going to have a huge impact on game developers. In my opinion it will be how Alan Wake performs on a PC if it ever does make it to PC. If it doesn't make it to PC I expect the first successful multithreaded game will make developers start trying it.

[Nixia]

The Phenom x6 is now released! I'm one day late I know...

Tbh, I'm a bit disappointed at the benchmarks I've seen. I though it would outperform the 965 with something like 30% but its actually slower in games since it has a lower clock speed (the 2 extra cores aren't used in games).

Games!




Programs!




Edit: I should mention that this processor is very cheap compared to i7-980.
Phenom II x6 at 2.8Ghz costs $209.99
Phenom II x6 Black Edition at 3.2Ghz costs $309.99

[Cilraaz]

It's extremely disappointing that the brand new top of the line from AMD would fall behind the Core i5 661 in any scenario, let alone 3 of the 4 scenarios shown above. Intel retains their crown, though that's not really too shocking.

[None]

It's extremely disappointing that the brand new top of the line from AMD would fall behind the Core i5 661 in any scenario, let alone 3 of the 4 scenarios shown above. Intel retains their crown, though that's not really too shocking.

Reading that much into synthetic benchmarks is bad. Read more performance benchmarks and you'll see that gaming performance is about the same as the 965/955 (As expected), it falls behind in single threaded applications (Also expected), and is far superior in encoding, overclocking, and temperatures. In synthetic benchmarks you're going to almost definitely see a big performance dip due to the lack of triple/quad channel memory, this doesn't mean anything in real world performance. Honestly I'm doubting most of the benchmarks I've seen, some show very insane, hard to believe numbers supporting the 1090T and some show next to nothing improved and even some show worse performance in what would be expected to perform better.

I'm not exactly happy with all of the different benchmark results across almost every website I've checked, but there are a few websites I trust more than others. Everything is too inconsistant to believe.

I'd also like to see the test setup on those benchmarks above, without the test setups you can't make any conclusion.

[Cilraaz]

Reading that much into synthetic benchmarks is bad.

Two of the three benchmarks above (I just noticed that the bottom two are the same exact benchmark in PCMark Vantage) are gaming benchmarks. Again, the fact that the brand new chip from AMD performed worse than the i5 661 in Crysis Warhead is disappointing to say the least.

That said, I just noticed where the above benchmarks are from. I tend to try to ignore any site whose methods I don't know. As such, I headed over to anandtech.com while writing this post.








All gaming benchmarks. Very disappointing. The i5 750 beat the new AMD CPUs in every test except for Fallout 3. On that test, the i5 750 was 0.7fps behind the 1090T and still 5.8fps ahead of the 1055T.

On the upside, the new AMD CPUs performed well in tasks such as video encoding and 3D rendering. To quote Anand:

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.

The better way to look at it is to ask yourself what sort of machine you're building. If you're building a task specific box that will mostly run heavily threaded applications, AMD will sell you nearly a billion transistors for under $300 and you can't go wrong. If it's a more general purpose machine that you're assembling, Lynnfield seems like a better option.

Unfortunately, most games fall into the "light or mixed workload scenarios". There just isn't enough going on in a game (even one as CPU-heavy as WoW) to fully stress 4 cores, let alone 6. The new Intel 6-core CPU, on the other hand, gains some benefit from the 50% increase in L3 cache, even when all cores aren't be used/stressed. For some unknown reason, AMD opted against increasing the L3 cache with their latest releases. This is why the new CPUs aren't seeing an increase over, say, a Phenom II x4 965 in some scenarios.

[edit: Source link]

[Nixia]

The site I took the benchmarks from are called www.sweclockers.com are is a Swedish site for overclocking and tech-news so I'm not surprised that you don't know about it.

[Iokau]

I wasn't expecting much in the gaming department, to be honest. Games aren't meant to use 6 cores...which is a good thing for us still using two...or in my case one ><. But it probably is nice for the multi-taskers and video-rendering people for an affordable six core processor to be on the market.

[Cilraaz]

The site I took the benchmarks from are called www.sweclockers.com are is a Swedish site for overclocking and tech-news so I'm not surprised that you don't know about it.

Yeah, and I wasn't trying to degrade the site. I just chose to pull some info from anandtech since I was unfamiliar with sweclockers.

[Nixia]

Games!




Programs!

Here is the setup for the Phenom:
CPU: AMD Phenom II X6 1090T (3,2 GHz)
Motherboard: Asus Crosshair IV Formula (BIOS 0602)
GPU: HIS Radeon HD 5870 1 GB
Memory: 4 GB DDR3 Corsair Dominator PC12800 (1333 MHz 7-7-7-20)
Software: Windows 7 64bit and cataclysm 10.2


Btw, the 1366 setup used the same memory but 6GB instead of 4.