Core i9 ''Gulftown'' Comes to Life

Intel's posterboy processor for the 32 nm Westmere architecture, the six-core Gulftown is now living, breathing silicon. The company seems to have already dispatched samples of the chip. Gulftown is based on the LGA-1366 socket. Featuring 6 cores and 12 threads with HyperThreading enabled, it holds 12 MB of L3 cache to support the additional data load over the QuickPath Interconnect.

A noted enthusiast has two Gulftown processors running in a dual-socket setup. This 12 core, 24 thread monstrosity uses 24 GB of DDR3 memory using 4 GB modules (perhaps 2 x 3 modules). The processors are running at 2.40 GHz (18 x 133 MHz). The machine was put through WPrime multi-threaded benchmark. It crunched WPrime 32M in a little over 6 seconds, and 1024M in 145.6 seconds. Going by older information, Gulftown should be implemented in a commercial product in Q1 2010, when Intel plans a host of other important product launches. When released as Core i9, the processor will target the premium enthusiast market.

Source: TechPowerUp