Phenom II X6 1055T and 1090T review - Introduction

AMD six-core processor has been touted - the king of budget is going strong

• AMD Phenom II X6 1090T
• AMD Phenom II X6 1055T

It has been roughly a month ever since Intel released their first consumer class six-core processor. That processor was welcomed very much in the high-end segment of PC hardware, the downside however .. it is a thousand dollar processor keeping it out of reach for 99.99% of you guys.

Very shortly after the successful release of that Core i7 980 Extreme processor things started to speed up at camp AMD as well. Initially planned for later this year, AMD started to reconfigure and position some of the pending SKUs, yes rumors started to surface on the processor series previously known as Thuban.

Thuban is AMD's 45nm based consumer generation of six-core processors. More and more rumors started to pop up though, the processor would get a serious 9MB cache and AMD was supposedly also working on their own 'Turbo boost mode that depending on the active work threads on the processor, which can increase the frequency to give single threaded application a little more bite.

And then AMD dropped a bomb, see we already anticipated that AMD typically charges 50 USD per core for their more high end processors, so we speculated with some wishful thinking that their most high end six-core processor could cost as little as 289 USD. That speculation got confirmed as well and with two models released, it gets even better.

So here we have the launch of AMD's Phenom II X6 series processors today. Make no mistake, these processors cannot compete with the thousand dollar Intel Core i7 980 Extreme (performance wise), but at less then a third of that price at 300 USD the Phenom II X6 1095T Black Edition processor all of the sudden can compete with say a quad-core Core i7 950 ~ 965 when it comes to multi-threaded applications.

And that makes it a REALLY interesting budget six-core processor. But ... today AMD releases two six-core processors, the AMD Phenom II X6 1090T clocked at a base clock of 3.2 GHz and the AMD Phenom II X6 1055T at 2.8 GHz.

Now that second processor, the Phenom II X6 1055T, is in fact even more surprising as it is a budget six-core processor, the 1055T at 2.8 GHz which is going to cost 199 USD. That's right, a six-core CPU clocked at 2800 MHz for less than 200 USD. That means sheer processing for very little money.

Both processors have a TDP of only 125W, both have the same caches and both are available based on the AM3 package, meaning pretty much any if not all AMD 700 series motherboards (and obviously the new AMD 800 series) will have support for the six core processors.

Anyway, let's head on over to the next page where we'll start the review. We'll also be testing on AMDs 890FX chipset today, as that is launching as well. But the 890FX chipset we'll spend another (separate) article on. Next page my man on towards some freakish hexcore lovin !