Quote Originally Posted by Manicdan View Post
i dont think if amd went the SMT route, would automatically get higher clocks. and lets face the fact its a little too late to rethink phenom, lol, its only 2 something years old, might as well be a senior citizen in the tech industry

and the turbo working on only 3 cores is very limiting in certain games. i think we need to see a good list of duel core and quad optimized games and compare them to a 955 (because the 955 and 1090T both run at 3.2 stock) so we should see a very obvious increase, or near identical.
Yes, 3 Turbo cores, but other 3 doesn't need to go to low clock!!
I'm just running with 2 cores crunching AOD stability test + normal system usage and typing this text:
2 cores crunching at 100% utilization are Turboed to 17x multi (3.4GHz)
4 cores are running mild tasks (utilization on average 30% per core with spikes to 100% and lows of 3%) and the multi is 14x (stock 3.2GHz)!

the good news is AMD Overdrive is able to let the user set how many cores can turbo (im 90% sure of this) so people can simply set it to 4 cores, deal with 15 more watts of heat, and see 400-500 more mhz in any game.
This is true

i would have really preferred in AMD did let 4 cores use turbo in x6, and leave it at 2 cores for x4 chips. 3 overclocked cores might as well have been left at 2, and get an extra 100mhz out of it, cause honestly how many applications take advantage of 3, nothing i can think of realistically. even if amd let 4 cores turbo, the TDP would be higher, but i dont think it would have been high enough to break the 125W TDP they set, unless if 6 cores at stock was atleast 115W.
With BE CPU there is no problem because you can bypass these limits.
Besides I'm sure once AMD launches 32nm cores we will have power gating and what you're describing will be implemented