Friday, July 31st 2009
Core i9 ''Gulftown'' Comes to Life
Intel's posterboy processor for the 32 nm Westmere architecture, the six-core Gulftown is now living, breathing silicon. The company seems to have already dispatched samples of the chip. Gulftown is based on the LGA-1366 socket. Featuring 6 cores and 12 threads with HyperThreading enabled, it holds 12 MB of L3 cache to support the additional data load over the QuickPath Interconnect.
A noted enthusiast has two Gulftown processors running in a dual-socket setup. This 12 core, 24 thread monstrosity uses 24 GB of DDR3 memory using 4 GB modules (perhaps 2 x 3 modules). The processors are running at 2.40 GHz (18 x 133 MHz). The machine was put through WPrime multi-threaded benchmark. It crunched WPrime 32M in a little over 6 seconds, and 1024M in 145.6 seconds. Going by older information, Gulftown should be implemented in a commercial product in Q1 2010, when Intel plans a host of other important product launches. When released as Core i9, the processor will target the premium enthusiast market.
Source:
XtremeSystems Forums
A noted enthusiast has two Gulftown processors running in a dual-socket setup. This 12 core, 24 thread monstrosity uses 24 GB of DDR3 memory using 4 GB modules (perhaps 2 x 3 modules). The processors are running at 2.40 GHz (18 x 133 MHz). The machine was put through WPrime multi-threaded benchmark. It crunched WPrime 32M in a little over 6 seconds, and 1024M in 145.6 seconds. Going by older information, Gulftown should be implemented in a commercial product in Q1 2010, when Intel plans a host of other important product launches. When released as Core i9, the processor will target the premium enthusiast market.
93 Comments on Core i9 ''Gulftown'' Comes to Life
Devs code for Console then port for PC these days, so even thinking about 6 cores or 8 isnt even in there ballpark, rushing to upgrade to this I9 is great for picking up other like minded geeks on the net if your into that kind of thing, but it certainly wont help you get the chicks, or even help your FPS in Real world games, but for benchmarking I can see it helping a great deal, as they can slap a refresh patch out for 3dmarks to help use the cores, but for coding a whole game I cant see it.
This chip would be great for a server, AMD are allready in the 8 core era and Intel know they had to bring soemthing out to compete.
Anyway, you are right in that many games do not support the cores, but the newer games will. It is for that reason that people building gaming rigs should not shun multi-core processors as it will make their rig a bit more future-proof.
Newer games won't because most of the market is still running dual-cores. Quad-core has to be mainstream before we start seeing some games that could put hexa-core to work.
Gotta be able to play games at max settings every once in a while :)
Oh the possibilities:)
Then again they made a lot of promises for DX 10 that didnt really pan out, i guess we have to wait and see.
My PII 940 should hold me over till then.
vantage would love this paired with a few next gen nvidia cards.
just remember when the 1st quad appeared a few years ago how many softs were written to use it except the benchmark ones....even now is poorly implemented the point is we need better softs now not cpu's