Intel Core i9 ‘Gulftown’ Previewed

Terry Olaes

Terry Olaes

I Used to be the [H] News Guy
Joined
Nov 27, 2006
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EXPreview has a sneak peek of Intel’s upcoming six-core, 32nm “Gulftown” processor. The CPU isn’t due until the first half of 2010 but their source snagged some ES’es and took some shots of them. Cool stuff.

See front page for pic.
 
Sweet. I'm hoping the desktop versions have support for ECC RAM, unlike the i7's.
 
love that's it's compatible with the x58. There's just something about looking at the threads and seeing 24 windows that just does it for me.
 
So there is no new chipset to go along with this? Will the X58 still be the top end platform or not?
 
k1pp3r said:
Why does CPU-z say i7
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The CPU is not is general release yet so CPU-z defaulted to the next closest thing. I had the same problem when I had a Q6600 before the quads were released to the general populace. Now you know why CPU-z is updated so often.
 
Not due till the first half of 2010? I wonder how many years of product they have in the can that they are just sitting on now.
 
pigpen said:
Not due till the first half of 2010? I wonder how many years of product they have in the can that they are just sitting on now.
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Just one. They don't produce further then a year ahead usually, and rarely that far unless they're just way ahead of schedule.
 
CPU-Z reports 12? threads, but the task manager sees 24 logical processors. It looks like this is a dual-socket config.
 
ordovician said:
CPU-Z reports 12? threads, but the task manager sees 24 logical processors. It looks like this is a dual-socket config.
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I was about to say something to this effect, so thanks for pointing it out.

That is, unless Intel has found a way to make four virtual cores per physical core.... Mmmm Ludicrousthreading....
 
Well a dual socket with two 6-core HT CPU's would give 24 threads.
 
Doh, just noticed there's actually a tab open on CPU-Z showing that it is a dual-socket dealio.
 
I wonder if these will have scaling issues similar to the X3s where some games didn't seem to know what to do with a tri-core but could use a quad-core.
 
i dont think its that cool. so it has 6 cores, do currently software even make full use of 4 cores cpus yet!?
 
im going to swap one into my i920 rig after the price becomes reasonable. I am sure it will be an extreme edition or something stupidly overpriced like that for awhile (akin to the quad core2s)
 
Meh, probably little chance of having (somewhat) reasonably priced dual socket desktop boards like back in the S370 era.
 
ordovician said:
CPU-Z reports 12? threads, but the task manager sees 24 logical processors. It looks like this is a dual-socket config.
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If you look at the drop-down menu in CPU-Z in the screenshot, you'll see that two processors are listed. CPU-Z only shows the info for one CPU at a time, so that's why it's showing 6 cores and 12 threads.
 
Can't wait to see another review on hyperthreading. We know it didnt do anything for p4 I wonder if it makes a different when you have 12 instances of it lol, Lets see 0*12=0. :rolleyes: Still maybe things have changed.
 
pxc said:
Meh, probably little chance of having (somewhat) reasonably priced dual socket desktop boards like back in the S370 era.
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Depends on what you consider reasonably priced and what features you need. The Asus Z8NA-D6C and Tyan S7002G2NR-LE are both pretty cheap, same price as a mid range X58 board.
 
niconx said:
Can't wait to see another review on hyperthreading. We know it didnt do anything for p4 I wonder if it makes a different when you have 12 instances of it lol, Lets see 0*12=0. :rolleyes: Still maybe things have changed.
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I don't know where you got that Hyperthreading didn't do anything for the P4. It was a significant improvement for Netburst and actually made it somewhat useful. Granted, it wasn't always useful especially if a single application was taking up a lot of the processor's time, but it was definitely not useless.
 
ryan_975 said:
I don't know where you got that Hyperthreading didn't do anything for the P4. It was a significant improvement for Netburst and actually made it somewhat useful. Granted, it wasn't always useful especially if a single application was taking up a lot of the processor's time, but it was definitely not useless.
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Yea that's my point, it didn't increase performance of a single app. Though I will admit that it did help with multitasking. Already having 12 cores I question how useful HT will be, even in a high performance situation were all 12 of those cores are actually used.
 
one of these machines has the power to operate an entire high school's computing needs all at once :eek:
 
niconx said:
Yea that's my point, it didn't increase performance of a single app. Though I will admit that it did help with multitasking. Already having 12 cores I question how useful HT will be, even in a high performance situation were all 12 of those cores are actually used.
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it didn't help with single-threaded apps. Hyperthreading was before multicores/processors were common-place. Now that they are, and developers have had some time to transition to developing for them, HT could be very beneficial. Even at 100% load, an execution unit is going to have some unused parts. So if HT can keep them busy with another thread, then what does it hurt to include it?
 
nlz242 said:
On core i7 it performs better than on northwoods p4. It will probably perform as well on i9...
Have a look at http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/Intel-Core-i7-Nehalem,2057-12.html
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Thanks for that, looks like video encoding once again sucks up anything it can get. Besides Winrar no other apps seem to get anything decent out of it. Great for people that do lots of video encoding but that's all it seems useful for. The two games they test get nothing as was the same for p4. Seems like only consistently repetitive math operations like those that would be used in file compression, video encoding, and encryption get anything out of this.
 
niconx said:
Thanks for that, looks like video encoding once again sucks up anything it can get. Besides Winrar no other apps seem to get anything decent out of it. Great for people that do lots of video encoding but that's all it seems useful for. The two games they test get nothing as was the same for p4. Seems like only consistently repetitive math operations like those that would be used in file compression, video encoding, and encryption get anything out of this.
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I think its more a matter of what is multithreadable.
Im currently reading a book on threaded programming (i am a programmer) and some tasks arent easy to multithread. Games for example, are pretty hard to multithread and get decent gains... I have heard that Valve, with their latest engine (used in L4D) somewhat succeed at getting a nice implementation going... havent really tested it myself tho, so i cant say.

Have a look at : http://www.bit-tech.net/gaming/pc/2006/11/02/Multi_core_in_the_Source_Engin/1
 
Diminishing returns. We've hit the point where cores, hyper-threading and god knows what else isn't helping the software.

Until Mac, Windows and Linux use all of them efficiently, waste of money for home users.
 
SymptomsReagent said:
Diminishing returns. We've hit the point where cores, hyper-threading and god knows what else isn't helping the software.

Until Mac, Windows and Linux use all of them efficiently, waste of money for home users.
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The problem is that the software itself isn't taking advantage of the resources, not that the resources aren't helping the software. And multiple cores, HT, and all that other stuff is still incredibly useful for people who do a lot of multitasking. Modern OSes are quite good at balancing threads across different cores.
 
SymptomsReagent said:
Diminishing returns. We've hit the point where cores, hyper-threading and god knows what else isn't helping the software.

Until Mac, Windows and Linux use all of them efficiently, waste of money for home users.
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The additional cores themselves may or may not help in the end, but it's safe to say that the new line of Intel chips will have quite a large performance boost.
 
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