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On the occasion of Game Developers Conference, an annual conclave of game developers, in San Fransisco, USA, Intel previewed to audiences its latest Core i7 980X Extreme Edition six-core processor. This meant that the media could publish performance evaluations of the new processor. Intel seems to have pulled it off with this launch. There is a broad consensus among the media that the six-core processor has a performance incentive with most of today's multi-threaded application that scales up well compared to quad-core processors.

The 980X is also the first high-performance processor based on the 32 nm Westmere architecture. The processor is able to maintain a TDP rating of 130W, on par with its 45 nm Nehalem quad-core counterparts. It has six cores operating at 3.33 GHz, with HyperThreading technology enabled, there are 12 logical CPUs (threads) for the operating system to deal with. Each core has 64 KB L1, 256 KB L2 caches, while a large 12 MB L3 cache is shared between all the cores. The Core i7 980X comes in the LGA-1366 package. Most existing motherboards with the Intel X58 Express chipset will be able to support it with a BIOS update. Intel will formally release the processor by April, at an estimated price of US $999.



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