Productivity
We have, for quite some time now, used WorldBench in our CPU tests. Over that time, we've found that some of WorldBench's tests can be rather temperamental and may refuse to run periodically. We've also found that some of the same tests tend to have inconsistent results that aren't always influenced much by processor performance. Other applications in WorldBench 6, like the Windows Media Encoder 9 test, make little or no use of multithreading, despite the fact that such applications are typically nicely multithreaded these days. As a result, we've decided to limit our use of WorldBench to a selection of its applications, rather than the full suite.

MS Office productivity

Firefox web browsing

Multitasking - Firefox and Windows Media Encoder

The two new Phenom IIs return to their middle-of-the-pack positions in these three benchmarks. The quad-core Phenom II X4 965 outruns its two successors in both Firefox and the multitasking test. Somehow, even the combination of two more cores and Turbo Core isn't enough to put the 1090T ahead of its predecessor.

File compression and encryption

7-Zip file compression and decompression

We return to more widely multithreaded tasks here, and Thuban shines appropriately, either matching or soundly beating its intended rivals from the Intel camp.

WinZip file compression

The older version of WinZip embedded in WorldBench uses either one or two threads, clearly no more than that. Fortunately, this gives us a chance to see Turbo Core in action, as the 1090T solidly improves on the X4 965's performance, though it can't catch the competing Intel offerings.

TrueCrypt disk encryption
Here's a new addition at our readers' request. This full-disk encryption suite includes a performance test, for obvious reasons. We tested with a 50MB buffer size and, because the benchmark spits out a lot of data, averaged and summarized the results in a couple of different ways.

How about that. Six cores rule in TrueCrypt, where the Phenom II X6s are second only to the Core i7-980X Extreme... despite costing a fraction of the price. We suspect the picture will change here once TrueCrypt incorporates support for the encryption-specific acceleration instructions built into Intel's 32-nm processors, but we're still awaiting a newer revision of this software.