new amd phenom ii x6 chips =]

[doubleanti]

Is anyone excited about the pending release (in the US) of the phenom ii x6 chips? I am. I'd like to get one as soon as they come out.

Right now I have a phenom i x4, so I hope this will be a considerable upgrade since the archtecture will be different, too.

Yum!

Also, clock-for-clock comparisions vis a vis intel confuse me, does anyone have any experience from switching from intel to amd or vice versa, and what chips did you have when? I've been using AMD since the first athlon x64s and have been living under a rock... in that sense...

Yay!

[kermit]

Is anyone excited about the pending release (in the US) of the phenom ii x6 chips? I am. I'd like to get one as soon as they come out.

Right now I have a phenom i x4, so I hope this will be a considerable upgrade since the archtecture will be different, too.

I would like to get a system running one of those, though I doubt it will be this year. The architecture is pretty solid, having been proven now for some time. Right now I am running an Athlon II X2 250 (3 GHz) which replaced my old Athlon 64 3500+. That was a really nice upgrade. My Dragon Naturally Speaking (DNS) works much nicer on the new machine. As to getting a new 6 core, I am not sure if there would be a lot of improvement on that front, by going to a Phenom II chip from the Athlon II chip I have now. On the one hand, the clock speed is potentially a little higher, depending on the chip (currently they are offering a 3.2 GHz 6 core which will go to 3.6 GHz in turbo core mode) though I am not sure if a 3.0 GHz would be noticeably slower than a 3.6GHz chip. On the other hand, I have heard that DNS really likes internal cache space, and considering the Athlon II chips are basically a Phenom II without the L3 cache, it is possible that DNS might work a little better yet with the Phenom II chips on account of having the extra (L3) cache. And then of course there is still the 1095T to come, which some have speculated to be clocked at 3.4GHz, though I don't know what it would be with 3 cores turned off in turbo core mode. Also, this would not be a $300 chip either.

Of course the highest clocked AMD chip will not compete with the 6 core Intel chips, but I think for a $500-$600 price difference, the performance gap will be bearable.

So in short, yes, I am excited about the new six core AMD chip release.

[Elysia]

I'm waiting for the Bulldozer chips. Hopefully they'll turn out good. AMD needs it.

[happyclown]

What can you do with 6 cores, that you can't do with 4 cores?

[laserlight]

What can you do with 6 cores, that you can't do with 4 cores?

Boast about the 6 cores.

[Elysia]

What can you do with 6 cores, that you can't do with 4 cores?

Run more games simultaneously!

[cpjust]

What can you do with 6 cores, that you can't do with 4 cores?

Waste more electricity and turn your room into an oven.

[crowe]

Waste more electricity and turn your room into an oven.

Actually, according to Tom's Hardware, the X6 1090T barely uses any more power than the X4 965.

Overall, it looks like AMD is finally stepping back up to the plate. Hopefully they can elbow their way back in to the mobile market, because Intel's offerings just aren't doing it for me(i3/i5 are hardly better than Core2Duo, the i7 mobile sucks up way too much power, and the Atom is just a horrible little processor).

[doubleanti]

I have a program for research which is highly parallelizable, and could benefit from the 70/80 percent increase I'd get from switch from a 2.5 x4 to a 3.2 x6. So, yeah...

Plus, since I'd be using DDR3 instead of DDR2, I assume I'd get a nice benefit out of that as well.

[laserlight]

I suppose I'll be able to get chess engines to analyse more deeply the games of the current world chess championship match, in the same amount of time.

[brewbuck]

I suppose I'll be able to get chess engines to analyse more deeply the games of the current world chess championship match, in the same amount of time.

There are plenty of positions with branching factor less than 6, so with 6 cores you can potentially get an extra ply...

[kermit]

Waste more electricity and turn your room into an oven.

Are we talking about the Phenom II X6 chips, or the new Nvidia GTX 480 gfx cards...?

[happyclown]

Right now I am running an Athlon II X2 250 (3 GHz)...

I've been thinking about upgrading my Pentium 4 to this CPU. Actually, I've been trying to find the energy efficient 250e(or 240e/245e), but for some reason they are so hard to come by. The "e" models only use 45W, compared to the normal 65W.

EDIT: Newegg has the new Phenom II X6 for $309.

Newegg.com - AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition Thuban 3.2GHz 6 x 512KB L2 Cache 6MB L3 Cache Socket AM3 125W Six-Core Desktop Processor

Much cheaper than a $970 Intel Core I7:

Newegg.com - Intel Core i7-975 Extreme Edition Bloomfield 3.33GHz 4 x 256KB L2 Cache 8MB L3 Cache LGA 1366 130W Quad-Core Processor

[kermit]

I've been thinking about upgrading my Pentium 4 to this CPU. Actually, I've been trying to find the energy efficient 250e(or 240e/245e), but for some reason they are so hard to come by. The "e" models only use 45W, compared to the normal 65W.

I wonder if some retailers are holding back the 250e until they clear out the stock of the older 65W chips?

[happyclown]

Quite possibly, Kermit.

Actually, I am now thinking of getting at least a quad or hex-core.

I upgrade my computer every 6-10 years, so I don't think a dual-core would cut it 6-10 years from now(although my 7 year old Pentium 4 is holding up well with XP). Might as well make the machine as future proof as possible.

The Athlon II X4 620/630 are ridiculously cheap quads(~$100), but they only have 512kb L2 cache per core. Still, that is better than a dual-core with 1mb cache/core.

Upgrade time is always exciting.

EDIT: Here's a nice review of the Athlon II X4 620/630 quads.

AMD Athlon II X4 Debut: Enter The $99 Quad-Core - HotHardware