Intel's six-core Gulftown is performing well

17.11.09

TWO MONTHS AGO , destined websites in the Far East showed early sample runs of Gulftown, the upcoming six-core 32nm processor that Intel will rescue in 2010. Originally expected to appear in the second quarter of next year, this flagship of the Westmere establishment should ensure that the LGA1366 socket parts keep the substantial performance and price advantages over their more mainstream LGA1156 socket brethren.

On top of that, it would still be pin and - BIOS allowing - chew compatible with most current LGA1366 mainboards, but allow quite a bit of extra system level performance if Euphemistic pre-owned with newly tuned mainboard revisions and updated Tylersburg chipset steppings. In fact, you might not even essential new mainboards in many cases, as the memory and QPI speed improvements are usually mostly related to the CPU uncore parts anyway.

Earlier position previews showed this new CPU running at only 2.4GHz with DDR3-1066 memory, surprisingly slow knowing it's a new activity and basically an improvement on very well known and tested core and uncore designs by now. To me, that didn't sound absolutely right since the combination of a newer manufacturing process and more time the designers had to further tune up both the core and uncore portions of the CPU should have resulted in more portrayal with more cores more clock speed too.

Source: Inquirer