Intel Core i7 980X review - Introduction

It's a fact, the multi-core revolution really is starting to take off isn't it? It was 2005~2006 when the first viable consumer dual-core CPUs hit the market. Many did not see the benefit of a multi-core design and certainly the software industry wasn't prepared for it. Almost all applications were written for single threaded software applications and that bugged the introduction alright as 99% of the time you had one active processor core, while the other one was sitting on its toosh doing nothing.

It's now anno 2010, the mainstream end-users are already moving onwards from dual-core towards quad-core processors. In more or less a five year timeframe, a lot has changed. Our operating systems have become very multi-core savvy, new software applications at the very least support two but often more threads and even a good number of our games have come and are becoming multi-threaded, benefitting massively from multiple processor cores when properly implemented. And sure, while we are not there yet with massive multi-threaded applications, the industry certainly has made a huge shift.

Why all the heavily threaded and multi-core processing you might wonder? Well the ODMs have reached their maximum clock frequency. Really 3.4 to 3.6 GHz is the maximum you are going to see from processors now and we think in the near future as well, and it has been that way for a couple of years already. So the only logical thing that companies like Intel and AMD can do to add performance is add more processor cores on the die and improve clock for clock performance per core.

It's therefore with great pleasure we can present to you today the very first consumer six-core processor review. You have all heard about Gulftown for many months now, it's the codename for this processor series. Intel used the 32nm fabrication node which we know from Core i3/5 Clarkdale processors. Thanks to a much needed die-shrink, Intel managed to place six processor cores onto one die with an end result that is flabbergasting. The Core i7 980X, with that X for Extreme, clocked at a 3.33 GHz clock frequency is to date the fastest multi-core consumer processor on the market, yet it retains a TDP of 130W.

Intel launches the Core i7 980X processor today priced at US $999 in thousand-unit tray quantities. It's scrumptious, it's delicious. Really it overclocks brilliantly as well; it's dark demonic matter my man. Head on over to the next page where we'll start up a technical overview and then head onwards to an extensive benchmark session, and sure... we'll throw in an overclock session as well. We've got a lot of ground to cover.

Oh yeah, before I forget, we'll be testing with an ASUS Rampage II Extreme motherboard coupled with OCZ Blade DDR3 memory. Working here at Guru3D.com is like working in a big toy-store really.

Hey, meet Gulftown...