Memory, latency, HEXUS.PiFast
| Percentage faster/slower than Phenom II X6 1090T |
Phenom II X6 1055T |
Phenom II X4 965 BE |
Core i7 980X |
Core i7 930 |
Core i7 920 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| + 0.37% | - 0.60% | + 35.38% | + 42.11% | + 42.11% |
There's nothing to choose between the quad and hexa-core Phenom IIs, all running DDR3 memory at 1,600MHz. Intel's tri-channel memory controller on X58 continues to create a sizeable performance gap as far as memory bandwidth is concerned. As detailed in the above table, the Phenom II X6 1090T's closest competitors - the Core i7 930 and 920 - come out over 40 per cent ahead.
| Percentage faster/slower than Phenom II X6 1090T |
Phenom II X6 1055T |
Phenom II X4 965 BE |
Core i7 980X |
Core i7 930 |
Core i7 920 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| + 1.22% | + 7.32% | + 10.98% | + 6.10% | + 4.88% |
There's little to choose between them in terms of memory latency, though.
| Percentage faster/slower than Phenom II X6 1090T |
Phenom II X6 1055T |
Phenom II X4 965 BE |
Core i7 980X |
Core i7 930 |
Core i7 920 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| - 7.99% | - 4.83% | + 19.79% | + 5.77% | + 1.86% |
Taking a look at single-threaded performance, our HEXUS.PiFast number-crunching benchmark doesn't benefit from the six cores available to the Phenom II X6 CPUs. Nonetheless, the X6 1090T is able to beat out the higher-clocked X4 965 BE courtesy of its 3.6GHz Turbo CORE functionality.
Importantly, AMD's latest comes close to matching the Intel Core i7 930 and 920 parts in terms of raw speed. The wicked-fast Core i7 980X is something else.
