Thursday, March 11th 2010
Intel Lets Loose Core i7 980X Performance Evaluations
On the occasion of Game Developers Conference, an annual conclave of game developers, in San Fransisco, USA, Intel previewed to audiences its latest Core i7 980X Extreme Edition six-core processor. This meant that the media could publish performance evaluations of the new processor. Intel seems to have pulled it off with this launch. There is a broad consensus among the media that the six-core processor has a performance incentive with most of today's multi-threaded application that scales up well compared to quad-core processors.
The 980X is also the first high-performance processor based on the 32 nm Westmere architecture. The processor is able to maintain a TDP rating of 130W, on par with its 45 nm Nehalem quad-core counterparts. It has six cores operating at 3.33 GHz, with HyperThreading technology enabled, there are 12 logical CPUs (threads) for the operating system to deal with. Each core has 64 KB L1, 256 KB L2 caches, while a large 12 MB L3 cache is shared between all the cores. The Core i7 980X comes in the LGA-1366 package. Most existing motherboards with the Intel X58 Express chipset will be able to support it with a BIOS update. Intel will formally release the processor by April, at an estimated price of US $999.
The 980X is also the first high-performance processor based on the 32 nm Westmere architecture. The processor is able to maintain a TDP rating of 130W, on par with its 45 nm Nehalem quad-core counterparts. It has six cores operating at 3.33 GHz, with HyperThreading technology enabled, there are 12 logical CPUs (threads) for the operating system to deal with. Each core has 64 KB L1, 256 KB L2 caches, while a large 12 MB L3 cache is shared between all the cores. The Core i7 980X comes in the LGA-1366 package. Most existing motherboards with the Intel X58 Express chipset will be able to support it with a BIOS update. Intel will formally release the processor by April, at an estimated price of US $999.
70 Comments on Intel Lets Loose Core i7 980X Performance Evaluations
www.pc-max.de/artikel/prozessoren/gulftown-intel-core-i7-980x/5738
Congrats to the rich people who are getting this.
as i've seen a msrp of about $999:eek:
amd doesn't have a cpu that is on par with the i7 975.
Seriously though, AMD doesn't have a CPU to truly compete with high end LGA775 stuff much less with i7 stuff. As for i7 980X, I think this one is geared towards serious power-users who get their hands on such CPU's before they hit retail anyways. I'm pretty sure almost every i7 CPU owner will agree, but other than dedicated videophiles, rest of us with i7 setups can't even being to utilize our little i7 920/930 quad's, much less a 6-core monster.
I have a secondary monitor that I use as a resource and hardware monitoring display, and in over a year now I haven't seen all my CPU cores being tasked @ 100% in any situation, other than benchmarking stuff like Prime95/OCCT. Heck, stuff like Crysis makes one or two of my cores hit 35% with spikes into 70% territory and that's it. Everyday poweruser stuff like specialized graphics design apps and similar kick up 2-or-3 cores to 50% and that's where it ends. Standard stuff like browsing, playing music and similar show negligible usage. Even lowest-end i7 CPU's are simply overkill for most tasks today, although if Microsoft continues with their tradition we might need 12-core monsters to run Windows 8. ;)
Intel needs stiffer competition so prices go down.
All EE Editions were atleast $999 as far as I can remember.