Intel's Core i7-980X Six-Core Benchmarked

Ninjakicks writes "Although they won't hit store shelves for a few more weeks, today Intel has officially unveiled the new Core i7-980X Extreme processor. The Core i7-980X Extreme is based on Intel's 32nm Gulftown core, derived from their Nehalem architecture and sports six execution cores. The chip runs at a 3.33GHz clock frequency, that can jump up to 3.6GHz in Intel's Turbo Boost mode. This processor has a max TDP of 130W, which amazingly is the same as previous generation Core i7 quad-core CPUs. Of course, it's crazy fast too. Some may say that the majority of applications can't truly take advantage of the resources afforded by a six-core chip capable of processing up to 12 threads. However, the fact remains there are plenty of multi-threaded usage models and applications where the power of a CPU like this can be put to very good use."

Re:Nice, but who has $1000 to pay on a CPU?

[eldavojohn]

I know there are SOME people out there who have $1000 to spend on just a CPU, but until these come down a long way in terms of price, it is WAY out of my price range.

Companies? Rendering farms? At this price, I'd imagine they're not really for the average consumer but more so for companies that can consider such a purchase an asset.

That said, you do realize that the i7-975 quad core that they compared it to is also nigh $1000 [newegg.com], right? I think showing that the same price will buy you an entirely different beast signals that quad cores are complete. The current quad cores price will come down but why would you make a more expensive quad core at Intel? The specs here show it cannot stand up to the new six core platform.

All these prices will come down, of course. So it's fun to look forward to what I'll be using in two years (I just bought a low range quad core for $140 a week ago, almost right in time for this).

And also, who strayed from the duo- quad- naming methodology?! Are you insane!? Do you have any idea the marketing power that a sexa core chip could have?

Re:Cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Er ... FAIL

Top 500 stats [top500.org] show that Intel has over 80% of the top 500.

Re:Turbo mode?

[TheRaven64]

The Turbo Boost mode is present on most of the newer Intel chips. It overclocks one of the cores, while underclocking the others, to give single-threaded apps a boost without exceeding the thermal envelope. It needs some extra support from the OS scheduler, because suddenly you have different cores running at different speeds, which messes up process accounting. As I recall the OS needs to specifically request turbo boost mode, which it does when one process is using all of the CPU time that it is given but other cores are idle.

Re:Cool

[petermgreen]

I know that Intel destroys AMD in performance benchmarks and real-world performance, but AMD is FAR less expensive.
hmm, are you aware of any good comparisions between the best AMD chips and the best intel chips available at a given price point?

I tried to do one by taking a look at http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2009-desktop-cpu-charts-update-1/Performance-Index,1407.html [tomshardware.com], looking up prices on newegg and ingnoring pricessors that are either unavailable at newegg or are more expensive than a faster chip of the same brand and limiting myself to quad core chips I got the following in decreasing order of speed

Intel Core i7-975 Extreme Edition $969.99
Intel Core i7-950 $569.99
Intel Core i7-870 $569.99
Intel Core i7-920 $288.99
Intel Core i5-750 $199.99
AMD Phenom II X4 965 $194.99
AMD Phenom II X4 955 $160.99
AMD Phenom II X4 945 $150.99
Athlon II X4 630 $99.99

I got bored and stopped after this point

but while doing it I realised that toms hardware mostly only tests high end stuff so it isn't a very usefull comparision (in partcular there was only one i5 quad core in that list)

Re:Turbo mode?

[Cowclops]

Thats not how it works. What it actually does is shuts power off to cores that aren't in use, and then overclocks the remaining ones. It won't/can't run different cores at different clock speeds. So if you have a 4 core processor, it might shut off 2 of the cores and then boost the clock speed by up to like 50% depending on what CPU it is, up to the thermal limits of the processor. The "breakthrough" in engineering is the part of the circuit that shuts off power to the unused cores better than anything else has in the past. This essentially gets you the best of both worlds in a single CPU - a lower clocked quad and a higher clocked single/dual core.

Re:Nice, but who has $1000 to pay on a CPU?

[petermgreen]

But intel should have kept the 1156 socket around longer. They did jump to socket 1366 really fast
They didn't jump from 1156 to 1366 at all (1366 is actually older than 1156). They created two different sockets for different markets (and I'm pretty sure there will be a third soon for the new processors with 8 cores, 4 QPI links and seperate memory buffer chips).

1366 is a socket really designed for dual-socket workstation and server stuff but also used for some high end single processor stuff. 1156 is the mainstream socket.