Scheduled for release sometime in the first half of this year, Gulftown is aimed at high-end desktops and workstations. Intel yesterday offered some juicy deets on the Westmere chip, including that 1.17 billion transistors onto 240mm sq. die and carries 12MB in L3 and a thermal design power of 130W at 3.33GHz. But the part we're most excited about is improvements in power efficiency.
This is the first design that can do power gating with not just CPU cores, but also the "uncore" parts of the chip. Previously, power gating the L3 cache was not possible because all that core data needed to be stored somewhere after everything else was shut down. However, rather than saving core data in the L3 when it shuts off, Intel has added a dedicated SRAM to store core data and enable Westmere 6C to power gate the L3 cache.
Other information revealed yesterday is that Gulftown will be sold under the Core i7 brand, will be capable of running 12 threads at once, and will not include integrated graphics. Unfortunately, the folks at Intel kept it zipped in terms of clock speeds
