News - AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition CPU review
AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition CPU review
This new six-core "Thuban" codenamed
die weights in with an estimated count of over 900 million transistors compared
to the 758 million transistors of "Deneb", most of which is concerned
with packing in those two additional CPU cores over its predecessor, which has
been achieved by increasing the overall die size to 346mm╡ against 258mm╡ for
earlier Phenom II parts. Despite those
additional cores, Thuban still sports the same shared 6MB of level 3 cache as
Phenom II X4 CPUs, although it does receive an additional 1MB of level 2 cache
to give it 3MB in total (although this still totals 512KB per core). All of this is fitted into AMD's existing AM3
socket, complete with DDR2 and DDR3 memory support, and with a TDP of 125 Watts.
The only other big change for the Phenom II X6
over previous Phenom II CPUs is the introduction of AMD's answer to Intel's
"Turbo Mode", known as "Turbo Core". Although its mechanics are somewhat simpler
than Intel's own turbo mode, the basic concept is the same, allowing the Phenom
II X6 to boost the clock speed of a core from its standard 3.2GHz to a peak of
3.6GHz while remaining within its TDP by independently increasing the clock
speeds of some cores (up to three at any one time) while others are dormant and
not doing any work, thus boosting performance in scenarios where not all six
cores are busy. @ Elite Bastards
