AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition

If there was any doubt in your mind that the core race hasn't cooled off, then the temporal proximity of AlvID's Thuban-based hexa-core launch and that of Intel's Core i7- 980X Extreme Edition should settle me matter. Based on the price of the Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition, you might deduce mat AlvID minks a six-core processor is for everyone. It's a noble position, for sure, but you'll have to read on to determine if everyone needs one.

Phenom II Plus 2 The Phenom II X6 1 090T Black Edi­tion is JUSt the latest ch ip to spring from AlvID's KI 0 architecture. Like with Intel's foray into six-core processors, mere's not much architecturally new here. AlvID stuck with irs 45nm SOl (silicon-on­insulator) immersion lithography process, which yielded a 346mm2 die. The socket AlvI3 chip features a 3.2GHz core fre­quency, integrated memory controller that supportS up to dual-channel DDR2- 1066 and DD R3-1600 memory, 512KB of L2 cache per core, 6MB shared L3 cache, and a 125WTDP. AlvID also launched its 890FX chipset, which, together with the Phenom II X6 1090T, composes the Leo platform. The chipset supports HyperTransporr 3.0, SATA 6GBps, 32 PCI-E 2.0 lanes for graphics (two x 16 slots or four x8 slots), six x l lanes, and one x4 lane for peripher­als on me northbridge, and another two PCI-E lanes on the southbridge. The 890FX doesn't suPPOrt USB 3.0 natively, bur if the MSI 890FXA-GD70 is any indication, chips from Marvell or NEC will likely appear on 890FX boards and put those extra PCI-E lanes on the south­bridge to good use.     Turbo CORE AfD's six-core dynamo in conjunction with any AlvI3 motherboard is capable of  increasing the frequency available to three cores when running applications that don't scale well in parallel. Like Intel's Turbo Boost, Turbo CORE automatical­ly tells the underurilized cores to go idle while boosting the remaining cores' fre­quencies (to within the listed TDP) to process the poorly parallelized tasks more quickly. For the Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition, frequencies on the three running cores can max out at 3.6GHz. Bur, as a Black Edition processor, you can overclock the CPU to achieve me same results (or better). AlvID's OverDrive util­ity also lets you tweak the Turbo CORE, i ncl using the number of cores to utilize and the clock frequency. The Bottom Line The difference between AMD's six-core and Intel's is night and day. But AlvID knows it and has priced the Phenom II X6 I090T Black Edition accordingly. Extreme mulritaskers and content creators who typ­ically run highly parallelized tasks, such as decoding, encoding, rendering, and image editing, will see real benefits here. With nonparallel tasks, Turbo CORE lends a hand on par wirh a healthy overclock. It's good to see mat A1vlD (like Intel before it) recognizes that throwing more cores at the software isn't the only answer, and we're happy to see the answer can be ours for comparatively lirde pocket change. by Andrew Leibman