Gultown will be the Core i9

Intel will brand the upcoming six-core "Gulftown" processors as the Core i9. This makes some sense in the whole senseless naming. It also clears up the choice of Core i7 name for "Bloomfield".

Intel seems to have come up with the following:

• Core 2 Duo and Quad, the beginning.
  
• What's better than a Core 2 Duo? A dual-core Nehalem, so call it Core i3.
• What's better than the Quad? Five. So call Core i5 for the HT-less quad core "Lynnfield".
• Add two, in a strange way, since HT provides a 30% performance improvement, sometimes less, and you've got the Core i7.

Naturally, the Core i9 would surface when adding another two cores, since there's no prediction of a HT-less hexa-core soon. The way to tell how many cores a CPU has by looking at the name is gone, which is the senseless part of the story.

As for the CPU itself, "Gulftown" will use LGA 1366 and will be compatible with current X58 motherboards - although this pends confirmation from Intel. The CPU will also be used to upgrade the Xeon line, possibly with the introduction of the Xeon 5600 series, which should also be compatible with current server designs based on the 5500 series Xeon.
This core is based on the "Westmere" refresh architecture and will be a tweaked "Nehalem" that will have an increase in L3 cache to 12MiB, contrary to AMD's "Istanbul" cores, which kept the same cache as the quad-core processor.
A 3GHz Core i9 will deliver 144 GFLOPS/s(errata: no AVX) 72GFLOPs/s in 32bit operations versus 48GFLOPS/s in a 3GHz Xeon 5500 and considerably higher than the current 2.6GHz AMD Opteron six-core, which delivers 62.4 GFLOPS/s.
The Core i9 will be released towards the end of the year or around January 2010.