Core i9 "Gulftown" early benchmarks

25-48% faster in multi-threaded apps, in line with the expected results of the added 50% processing power.

HKEPC has published benchmarks of the upcoming revised architecture known as "Westmere", which is a 32nm processor with some architectural improvements.


Game performance doesn't increase much but since games are traditionally cache size bound, the increase in L3 cache size from 8 to 12MB does have some effect on performance. CPU scores are very high, as expected.

This result I actually found surprising, given that the CPUs benchmarked both seem to run at 2.4GHz and Cinebench usually scales well to multiple cores. There's some lack of bandwidth for the hexa core, it seems.
Scientific benchmarks don't yield massive improvements due to the same bandwidth limitations.

The other reference at clockspeed can be found here, where the 2.4GHz Core i9 is compared with the Core i7 965. It actually draws less power, but it's also clocked 800MHz lower - this figure should improve slightly in retail processors, especially for follow up revisions.

Now it's up to Intel to deliver the final specs and pricing on the chip but it should be available only in one model, costing $999 and sold as an Xtreme Edition model.