Six-Core Analysis: AMD’s Phenom II X6 Gets Scaled Down

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What’s the real benefit of six cores versus five, four, three, two, or one? This article looks at the performance, power, and efficiency of AMD's Thuban-based six-core Phenom II X6 1090T processor running with several different core configurations.

Benchmark Results: Synthetics

The ALU test of Sandra 2010 Pro shows that each core you add introduces a multiple of single-core performance with a few exceptions. Two cores seem to deliver more than 2x performance.

The SHA256 encryption test again shows that two cores perform exceptionally well. This could be because of Turbo CORE.

The memory bandwidth test shows that four cores easily saturate the DDR3 memory controller.

Patrick Schmid and Achim Roos