A question about Phenom II vs Core i7

Mellon Head said:

The i7 has eight virtual cores, the Phenom has 6.

One small correction. The i7 has 4 physical cores and 4 virtual cores (or 6 and 6 if you want to go to the i7 980x), the PII x6 has 6 physical cores.

stormy13 said:

Mellon Head said:

The i7 has eight virtual cores, the Phenom has 6.

One small correction. The i7 has 4 physical cores and 4 virtual cores (or 6 and 6 if you want to go to the i7 980x), the PII x6 has 6 physical cores.

Yes. Thank you for the correction. I often mistakenly lump the i7 cores together and think of them all as virtual when they are clearly not, as you've stated. I have edited my original post.

Mellon Head said:

sygnus21 said:

Now I'm sure someone who knows AMD can put something similiar together for you to consider.

My two cents.

The thing with the AMD system is, as mentioned, the cost of the motherboard is generally lower. The AM3 socket series uses dual channel DDR3 modules in a 2/4/8 configuration.

AMD has a slight advantage in the system complexity department, that being the memory controller is on the die of the Phenom, not on the motherboard, and it cuts down on the board's "real estate requirements". Less circuit traces and layers mean reduced cost of the board.

Intel went to the integrated memory controller for the Socket 1366/ core I7 CPUs. They support triple channel memory, but it's not mandatory. (Recommended, though.) The Socket 1156 CPUs have dual channel memory controllers.

A quick look at at www.newegg.com shows that there are some Socket 1156 motherboards that are cheaper than most AMD 790FX boards. (The X58 Socket 1366 boards are more expensive, starting at about $150.)

I'm almost glad that I didn't have all these choices at the time of my latest mainboard/CPU upgrade. Too complex.

You should also notice that the i7 processor has TurboBoost which overclocks it to up to 3,4GHz (or something like that), if more processing power is needed. You will feel quite a difference between the processors while multitasking...

Actually that would depend on the processor as to how much for a given turbo increase.

Example: my i7-930 is stock clocked at 2.80GHz (133x21). With turbo mode enabled, the processor will reach a top speed of 2.93 (133x22) This is for a non-overclocked chip.

Now, and this is important to note - I can set my mutiplier to 22 (default is 21), and have the chip run at 2.93, instead of 2.80, but doing so will disable turbo mode and the chip will run no higher. Again, non-overclocked chip.

However, If I overclock, but keep the multiplier below 22, the chip will go into turbo mode. It's when the chip reaches its multi limit that turbo doesn't work. At least that's the way I understand it; and I'm not sure how high it will jump, for example, If I use a 20 multiplier, will turbo mode jump it to 22? Not sure about that.

FYI, the Extreme chip, i7-980x, does not have a locked multiplier so I'm not sure how Turbo mode works on it, but i'm pretty sure it does work.

My two cents

I don't think they have been released yet. Unless you want to classify the i7-980x as an i9 seeing that it's a six-core processor named "Gulftown"

Intel six core Gulftown named i7 980-X : Intel Processor Forum

Intel's Core i9 "Gulftown" Six-Core Processor Pictured | Maximum PC