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: 3DMark And PCMark Vantage

3DMark’s CPU test scales nicely with every core you add.

The GPU test is limited by the Radeon HD 5850 we use here.

The overall score blends both results and proves that graphics horsepower is more important once you have two or more cores.

PCMark Vantage did not run on the Phenom II X6 that we limited to a single core. The overall results show that more cores mean more performance, but not necessarily a lot. Keep in mind that PCMark is a synthetic benchmark that doesn’t reflect everyday operation. Rather, it was designed for measuring the performance of specific workloads.

Patrick Schmid and Achim Roos