Six-Core Analysis: AMD’s Phenom II X6 Gets Scaled Down

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What’s the real benefit of six cores versus five, four, three, two, or one? This article looks at the performance, power, and efficiency of AMD's Thuban-based six-core Phenom II X6 1090T processor running with several different core configurations.

Benchmark Results: Efficiency

Six cores are decidedly fastest at completing our efficiency workload.

Interestingly, average power consumption was lower on five cores than on four during our workload.

Total power used scales well. It's obvious that the many-core configurations require less total power to complete our workload.

As a result, the higher active core counts deliver better performance per watt.

Patrick Schmid and Achim Roos