It’s still a while away until these chips are released, but in an early review the upcoming Intel Core i9 is shown to be truly top-of-the-line. The 6-core processor, codenamed “Gulftown”, is made via the 32nm process and is based off the Intel Westmere architecture (the 32nm Nehalem die shrink). The test unit shipped to PCLab was an unspecified Gulftown model with a clock speed of 3.07GHz and it uses the LGA 1366 socket.
While the Core i9 is similar in performance to other Nehalem CPUs when it is doing single- or dual-core operations such as gaming and Windows startup, however when you crank up the threaded applications such as x264 encoding and ray-tracing the Core i9 shines. It pulled ahead by 46% in the POV-Ray test and by approximately 50% in the MPEG-2 to x264 encoding. The CPU also pulled ahead in the 3DMark Vantage CPU score, but the main score varied only slightly compared to the Core i7
These processors are bound to be expensive when they ship in 2010, but it’s well worth it considering the performance benefits in some applications.
