Looks as though Intel's "Gulftown" processor has seen a slight delay, now pushed back from its original Q4 2009 / Q1 2010 ship date.
Hardware site HKEPC is reporting that information provided by a "Taiwan motherboard entrepreneur"--Intel's Gulftown processor will arrive on the market sometime around Q2 2010. The processor was originally expected to appear in Q4 2009 / Q1 2010 but now seems to be pushed back (if the information is correct). The upcoming 32nm processor is actually the successor to the Bloomfield core that currently serves the Core i7 920, 940, and 965 CPUs, and when released, Gulftown will aim towards the high-end desktop and DP server markets.
As part of the follow-up to the Westmere-based Core i7 family, the Gulftown processor will come packed with six cores, Hyper-Threading technology activated allowing it the ability to process 12 threads at one time. Gulftown will also be compatible with the LGA 1366 socket, the Intel X58 chipset, and feature a TDP of 130W. When it eventually arrives, Gulftown will support 2x QPI (Intel's QuickPath Interconnect), 3x DDR3 800-1066 and 12 MB of shared L3 cache.
Additionally, Gulftown will also feature a new set of instructions that supposedly gives over 3x the encryption and decryption rate of AES processes than previous CPUs. This means that Gulftown can perform hardware-accelerated encryption, providing not only faster execution, but protection against software targeted attacks. The processor will also reduce latency in virtualization transition as well thanks to more hardware-based virtualization extensions.
I think for now until later next year, 4 cores should be more than enough for anyone who's not going to use their systems to only do professional work. Of course if you're doing Adobe Premiere or Sony Vegas on your systems, the more cores, the merrier.
Just gotta keep saving...
We already got Six-Core.
You could do that on an i7 if you had the right video card...
But anyways, now I am in a predicament whether to wait for one of their 32nm chips or go for an i7... my gut is saying i7. OR if whatever AMD has to offer is more fitting, then go for it
Other that use virtualization or whatever on a server will be happy. Overkill for a desktop.
But seriously, I still believe they might be holding out the material that intel discover? The III-V material, P-channel and N-channel transistors, maybe? Or I think it's something else, making sure that it's fully compatible with the 1366 issue? And they discover a kink in the 6-core 1336 and scrambling to fix it, after they just released a few samples out not to long ago?