Monday, December 14th 2009
Gulftown Product Name and Tentative Price Surfaces
Contrary to older reports, Intel will stick to the Core i7 brand identifier to sell its first consumer (client) six-core processor based on the Nehalem architecture, codenamed "Gulftown". The first offering of these socket LGA-1366 processors, is the Core i7 980X Extreme Edition. Its positioning and pricing shows that Intel will replace its current flagship desktop processor, the Core i7 975 Extreme Edition with it, and at the very same price-point of US $999 (in 1000 unit tray quantities).
A future price list also shows that the Core i7 980X Extreme Edition is slated for March 2010. A month ahead of its launch, Intel will introduce the Core i7 930, which succeeds the Core i7 920 at its price-point of $284. The Gulftown core will be manufactured on Intel's brand new 32 nm HKMG process, it features 6 processing cores with 12 threads (HyperThreading Technology), triple-channel DDR3 memory with its integrated memory controller, 6.4 GT/s QPI link to the Intel X58 Express chipset, 12 MB of L3 cache, compatibility to platforms that support the Core i7 9xx processors, and 130W TDP. The Core i7 980X Extreme Edition comes with a clock speed of 3.33 GHz, The Core i7 930 on the other hand, is a quad-core processor which runs at 2.80 GHz.
Sources:
PCOnline.com.cn, ZOL.com.cn
A future price list also shows that the Core i7 980X Extreme Edition is slated for March 2010. A month ahead of its launch, Intel will introduce the Core i7 930, which succeeds the Core i7 920 at its price-point of $284. The Gulftown core will be manufactured on Intel's brand new 32 nm HKMG process, it features 6 processing cores with 12 threads (HyperThreading Technology), triple-channel DDR3 memory with its integrated memory controller, 6.4 GT/s QPI link to the Intel X58 Express chipset, 12 MB of L3 cache, compatibility to platforms that support the Core i7 9xx processors, and 130W TDP. The Core i7 980X Extreme Edition comes with a clock speed of 3.33 GHz, The Core i7 930 on the other hand, is a quad-core processor which runs at 2.80 GHz.
66 Comments on Gulftown Product Name and Tentative Price Surfaces
To me that just confirms that the QPI setting is only a multiplier, and that multiplier (x36) doesn't change on a 920. Even if you're at 133. If you set the multiplier higher, but it won't actually go higher. Overclocking the QPI is possible by increasing the BCLK on a 920, but you can't actually change it just by fiddling with the multiplier.
::EDIT:: Color me funny but you can actually set your QPI higher at 133, and only 133. That's brilliant! It does absolutely nothing since neither the cpu multiplier or bclk are high enough for it to be bottlenecked. On EE chips you can actually set your QPI to (x48) with higher BCLKs and it will work whereas it won't on my 920.
Extreme) it changes the QPI clock frequency to 3.2 Ghz.
To achieve the actual throughput your system is going to have to be clocked faster than 2.66 Ghz.
You can't change the multiplier to reach 4 Ghz. So how are you going to do it?
:roll:
In any case, when Intel is making their i7 series chip, do they make them all exactly the same and then product bin them?
Setting the QPI results in a 3.2 Ghz speed.
Since they consider it bi-directional, they must get 6.4 GTransfers out of it.
Is that not the proof we were looking for? (correct me if I'm wrong here someone) :D
Which brings me back to my original question: will we be able to do that on the 930?!
I don't have DDR3 2000 Ghz+ Ram sitting on my desk, though, which brings us back to being able to simply select the speed of the ram in use. We're only talking about 24.6 GB/s though.
btw, if you're doing this (the guy with houses face whose name right now eludes me), the motherboard will default to a higher memory setting. Make sure you reduce it to what your memory is rated for. I reduced it in the bios to 1.51 volts so it wouldn't increase automatically to 1.65 volts or 1.8 volts.
Obviously you need fast memory on the other side of the link in order take advantage of the link speed.
As well, if you're really going to overclock, you'll need the fast memory to do it!
www.tcmagazine.com/comments.php?shownews=31518&catid=2
I wonder how much is that X5650 or that L5640.... I will surely buy one of them.
Hey I saw someone post about 5.0 GHz Gulftowns so I googled and found them for sale at Amazon! Pretty cool!
Link was:
www.amazon.com/Trinity-Lightning-Vapor-Cooled-i7-980X/dp/B0042R3A2W/ref=sr_1_cc_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1285902732&sr=1-1-catcorr