It's been a long time coming, but AMD finally has some real competition for the impressive Intel Core i7 920 processor. With six physical cores, faster clock speeds and TurboCore to balance out its single threaded performance, the 3.2GHz AMD Phenom II X6 1090T processor manages some stellar benchmarking results, particularly in the areas of content creation and 3D ray tracing.

TurboCore marks AMD's foray into dynamic, load-based CPU core speed adjustment. It goes a long way to addressing the traditional problems that multi-core processors have in single and dual-threaded environments, where a many-core processor generates too much heat to reach the high frequencies that single and dual-core processors are capable of.

When the first many-core processors came out, users had to weigh if they wanted good single-threaded performance for day-to-day applications and games, or good multi-threaded performance in content creation applications that were capable of taking advantage of extra compute cores.

With a street price of around $280 USD ($280 CDN, £165 GBP) (ie. Newegg), the 3.2/3.6GHz AMD Phenom II X6 1090T processor is a no brainer for anyone looking to build a powerful content creation system. With six cores rendering in 3D or doing video encoding, it can easily keep up with anything that Intel has at the same price point. Even better is that you can pair the AMD Phenom II X6 1090T up with an inexpensive AMD 890GX-based motherboard and get the exact same performance, instead of having to buy into a more expensive socket 1366 Core i7 processor, Intel X58 chipset motherboard and triple-channel DDR3 memory. To borrow a phrase, "it's the platform."

Of course there are still a few issues that come along with any new architecture...

Most notably power consumption for the AMD Phenom II X6 1090T is still quite high, especially when compared against Intel's Core i5 series of processors. Turning on TurboCore automatically increases the processor's voltage when cores are loaded to ensure stability, which has the side effect of increasing system power draw. Fortunately this behaviour can also be turned off using AMD's Overdrive software, though most users are unlikely to actively take this step. Under PCSTATS' testing, the AMD Phenom II X6 1090T CPU really didn't require any voltage increases in order to maintain stability of a 3.6GHz overclock under load, but as always individual processors may vary.

With the additions of the Radeon HD 5800-series of videocards, the AMD 890FX and 890GX chipsets and 6-core AMD Phenom II X6 1090T, AMD now has serious power in its Vision platform. Combining these three parts as the foundation of a new computer rig will make for an excellent price-to-performance system, but even on its own the six-core AMD Phenom II X6 1090T processor is a winner.

Taking all this into consideration the bottom line is this - if you can afford the trappings of an 8-thread Intel Core i7 9-series computer system, that platform will generally offer the best performance over all (with caveats here and there for specific benchmarks). If you're on a tighter budget the 6-core AMD Phenom II X6 1090T built with an AMD 890FX motherboard will provide nearly the same level of performance with a large side of savings.

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