AMD hits back against Intel in the six-core stakes, with an amazing processor we'd be happy to upgrade to.
If ever there was a duet consisting solely of fiddles, AMD would be the musician to play last. It's not that AMD isn't good at fiddling, but simply that until now, its performances haven't quite caused anyone to buckle at the knees, bouncing along on the same lusty clouds that Intel has managed to generate for quite some time. Clearly it's time for AMD to rethink its sheet music, change its tune and play to its strengths - and that's exactly what AMD's enthralling us with today.
A concerto of coresSince the inception of the Phenom X4 design, AMD has touted its monolithic quad-core architecture as something akin to the second coming; while it was the first manufacturer to achieve this, it didn't exactly help them win in the performance stakes. Nor did its follow-up design, the Phenom II X4, merely following in the footsteps of the former processors and offering a few refinements, but the listening experience remained much the same. Today though, AMD has unveiled their newest orchestral piece - the Phenom II X6.
The X6 is a new design that selects chords from the X4 that harmonise with the others, while discarding some that merely muddied its sound. A single X6 chip now boasts six individual processing cores that, while they're still based around the K10 architecture, signify the first hexa-core processor to be released since Intel's Gulftown design. Each K10 core within the X6 chip retains access to two 64KB chunks of lightning-fast L1 cache, one each for Instruction and Data information, that act as working memory - providing on-demand access to the pieces needed to complete various calculations. The L1 caches are fed by a larger, though slower L2 cache that totals 512KB, and each core has its own exclusive allotment of the first two levels of cache. The L1 and L2 caches are pictured on the colourful die shot (above) as six purple areas adjacent to the six identical blue rectangles, which themselves are the processing cores.
Residing at the end of the chip is a large green area that designates the final area of memory, working more as short-term memory for the processor, called the L3 cache. There is 6MB of cache here, the slowest to be included with the processor, but one that functions as a contiguous and cohesive whole that can be divided up based on core-by-core demands for space. In this way, the entire 6MB can be given to a single core if it so needs, or split up between all six cores as they require. Strangely this is the same size as the older Phenom II X4 955, though as the die size sits at 346mm2 with a transistor count of 904 million it's not unsurprising.
Turbo, presto!Intel's Turbo mode first made its showing in the LGA1156-based desktop processors, and finally, AMD has an answer. Unimaginatively named 'AMD Turbo CORE Technology', the X6 is the first processor that can scale its performance up or down automatically, though the methods behind its functionality are perhaps not quite as refined as their competition.
Rather than basing the frequency of the cores upon hte workload that each individual core is under and the temperature of the processor as a whole, AMD's solution seems to rely upon power consumption alone - not a bad metric, but it's still a little brute-force. Our X6, which sat at a stock clockspeed of 3.2GHz, automatically boosted some of its cores to 3.6GHz when under specific loads. This was not without flaws - it overrode the C1E and Cool n' Quiet settings in the BIOS, altering voltages and multipliers as it saw fit, and hampering overclocking when enabled.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012