Over the past few years the leading computer processor makers, namely AMD and Intel have been engaged in the battle of producing more powerful and efficient multi core CPUs. Both companies have met with mixed results and efforts are on to produce more power efficient and performance oriented products. The first generation Pentium D CPUs were trounced by the AMD dual core Athlon 64 CPUs. However, Intel bounced back with its Conroe based Core 2 Duo CPUs that left AMD licking its wound.
AMD’s efforts to retaliate with its triple core Phenom CPU met with limited success and Intel continued to reign with its Core i7 and i5 family of multi core CPUs. Now Intel wants to strengthen its position in the ever evolving CPU market with its upcoming Core i9 family of processors. The exact date of the launch remains to be known, but from the industry buzz it is clear that it will be released sometimes in 2010.
The preview edition of the Gulftown CPU has been tested by some independent benchmarking agencies and the results are quite encouraging. With Gulftown, Intel moves to a CPU type that is manufactured using a 32nm process. As of now, Intel does not plan to add a discrete GPU to this chip. The Gulftown core retains some of the features used in Intel’s Nehalem CPUs and also introduces some new features. As per the industry insiders, Gulftown CPUs will support DDR3-1600 RAM. This could change in the final commercial version though.
Due to its new architecture, the Gulftown chip accommodates more transistors compared to its predecessor, Nehalem. The additional two cores of the Gulftown as well as its added L3 cache give it a performance edge over the existing Intel Quad core chips. By default, Gulftown chips offer six cores and when hyper threading technology is enabled it is multiplied to 12 logical cores. While it has 64kb L1 and 256 kb L2 cache, the L3 cache is a whopping 12 MB. The test model runs at a stock speed of 2.4 GHz but in future models with stock speeds above 3 GHz will be launched.
Intel has not yet released a new chipset exclusively for the Gulftown chip and this probably indicates that an X58 motherboard will support it post a BIOS upgrade. The power consumption is also supposed to be within the range of 130 watts. From the early tests it is evident that the Gulftown chip excels in running 64 bit applications. It scores more points than the Core i7 920 CPU in Cinebench R10 test. However, its hyper threading is not really suitable for gaming. In some games like Race Driver Grid and Far Cry 2, Hyper-threading can actually prove to be a bottle neck for the CPU. However, to utilize the six cores of the upcoming CPU, the game developers need to optimize the codes. Otherwise, the majority of the games will not be able to use the additional cores in the Gulftown chip. Since it is a high performance processor slated to replace the current generation Top notch CPUs like the Core i7-975, its cost could be around $1000 approximately.
