Intel ''Gulftown'' Sample Overclocked

Intel's upcoming hexa core looks promising for workstations and future proof high-end desktops.

It has been public knowledge that Intel will be releasing their first six core processor in the coming months but new details have only been released sparsely and no exact release date has been unveiled so far.
What we do know is that the CPU will be called Core i9 and that it will be based on the reworked "Nehalem" core codenamed "Westmere", which is also a shrink to 32nm. Back when this information became available, I published some peak performance numbers of the new processor:

A 3GHz Core i9 will deliver 144GFLOPS/s in 32bit operations versus 96GFLOPS/s in a 3GHz Xeon 5500 and considerably higher than the current 2.6GHz AMD Opteron six-core, which delivers 124.8 GFLOPS/s.

Comparared to the upcoming Phenom X6 "Thuban", the Core i9 will be more balanced as it will also increase the amount of L3 cache in the same proportion as the number of cores. AMD has only increased the core count but AMD's processors do feature a larger 512KiB L2 cache per core, compared with 256KiB in Intel's processors. That approach has payed off in the server and HPC market where AMD manages to grab the performance crown in some workloads but it will hardly be enough on the consumer market. Intel will have a big performance advantage from both the higher performance per clock and the higher clock. The "Gulftown" CPUs will also take fewer die space due to the smaller 32nm process.

This "Gulftown" engeneering sample was placed in a high-end EVGA X58 4-Way SLI motherboard:


The 3DMark numbers are interesting - with four 5870's, mind you - but just look at the air-cooled overclocking results:


4.6GHz on air cooling is a very good result this early in the game. While it certainly doesn't look like a quiet fan on that CPU, it is a good result nonetheless.



What about LN2? Have a look:


6.1GHz and capable of running 32M digits on Super Pi. A good result, shy of the 7 GHz AMD has been achieving with 45nm processors but the 32nm process still needs to mature and it's running on two cores less.

The Core i9 is looking promising but it won't be missed by someone looking for better performance in today's games. The gaming industry has been slow to pick up the increasing core density and dual cores still tackle most games fine. Quad cores are bringing some benefits to the table but still not enough to justify increasing core count further.

Source: Xtemesystems