Intel's Core i9 "Gulftown" Six-Core Processor Pictured
Getting bored with Core i7 already? That's okay, because word on the web is that Intel plans to release its six-core Gulftown processor sometime in the first half of 2010, and possibly by Q1.
What's believed to be the first product shots of the six-core part have been leaked to the web. Likely to be called Core i9, the pictures show off the new chips in a dual-socket motherboard that's either an existing Xeon-based socket LGA1366 mobo or a next-gen Skulltrail platform. Either way, that's 12 cores of processing power, and 24 cores with hyperthreading enabled.
According the alleged screen grabs, the engineering sample spied in the photos comes clocked at 2.4GHz courtesy of a 133MHz bus speed and 18X multiplier, along with 12MB of L3 cache.

Image Credit: expreview.com
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HerofTime64
August 04, 2009 at 6:06am
Don't get me wrong....I'd love to have one but programs are just now starting to develop for 2/4 cores...and now 6? These might work best as new server chips. Go Intel! woot!
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bingojubes
August 03, 2009 at 4:08pm
i think if the i9 is for the lga1366 socket size, i will get one of those + 6 more GB of RAM for my next upgrade. you would figure they should make them faster than 2.4-2.6 GHZ for the lowest teir ones. maybe if they could make those i9's 4GHz or more, they would get more sales? 3.33GHz seems to be a good speed, but not as extreme as 4-5GHz. otherwise, it just be a not so justified upgrade in the future...yet.
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dag1992
August 03, 2009 at 11:43am
Well AMD's Shanghai came out rather quietly, let's see which is a better UNIX platform then.
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dag1992
August 03, 2009 at 10:24am
It's nice and all, but how many programs can use six cores? Isn't it that software is only just being optimized for 4 cores?
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Mr_Armageddon
August 03, 2009 at 1:19pm
I have yet to find an application that will use all 4 cores plus the 4 virtual threads (HT) from my i7 Core 920, but I say keep'em comming.














