The world’s largest manufacturer of microprocessors will launch its first 6-core retail processor in Q2 2010, if we are to trust the leaked roadmaps. Even though we still have six months or so to go before we actually get to see Intel’s 32nm hexacore processor on the market, the first review is already out. Chinese hardware site HKEPC has acquired an engineering samples with six CPU cores and HyperThreading support crunching up to 12 threads at a time.
The processor operates at 2.4GHz clock frequency and even if the CPU we will see on the shelves next year will operate at a much higher frequency it is still very much possible to test the sample at the frequency it’s operating at today, and compare it to the current generation of quad-core Bloomfield processors.
The benchmarks done by HKEPC shows that the base architecture of Westmere is the same as in Bloomfield and the performance in most applications is pretty similar. It’s not before you start using programs and tests that make use of the two extra cores that Gulftown can distance itself from Bloomfield.
They discuss the possibility of launching Gulftown as Core i7-1000 instead of Core i9 as the latest rumors have indicated.
The perhaps most impressive bit is that the A1 stepped Gulftown processor used here consumes less power than the equivalent Bloomfield processor at both idle and and load, in spite of the two extra cores. It certainly shows that Intel’s 32nm technology is maturing well.
The articles is in Chinese but benchmarks are (most of the time) universal and for the really curious there is always Google Translate.
