Corei9


Tapped to succeed the Bloomfield (Core i7) at the top of Intel’s performance heap, the new

Core i9-branded part will launch with a raft of enhancements to make sure it fills those

shoes.

Gulftown’s membership in the 32nm Westmere family of architectures has allowed Intel to drop

temps, boost cache, raise clockspeeds and increase the cores– six, to be exact. With a dash of

HyperThreading and X58 compatibility, enthusiast desktops will be primed to chew through

twelve concurrent threads when the chip debuts in early 2010.



Immediate obsolescence is an age old problem in the computer industry, but it doesn't look

like the upcoming Core i9 "Gulftown" processor is going to do anything to solve it. Word is

from early benchmarks of the upcoming Intel processor is that it bests the current Core i7 at

the top of the heap with speed gains as large as 50% -- directly in line with its addition of

two cores on top of the Core i7's existing four. Of course, six 2.8GHz cores aren't quite as

exponentially helpful when applied to non-optimized tasks, but with most major modern software

development aimed at better utilizing multiple cores, the core overkill of Core i9 will likely

prove increasingly useful over time. At the start, however, Core i9's improvements will come

at a premium: 130W power consumption instead of 95W in Core i7, and of course a high-end only

price tag to match. Word is we'll be seeing these chips hit the market in early 2010, possibly

as soon as January.