Intel Gives More Details Six-Core Gulftown CPUs
In a press conference yesterday Intel offered a few more tidbits of information on the six-core Gulftown chips it plans to launch later this year.
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

Yeah, but he can probably get 2K for a kidney.
If I misinterpret your statement correctly, you want to pay 4 times the money for a three-socket dual core setup that will have the same performance as a 6 core CPU?
Yeah, but he can probably get 2K for a kidney.
I'll pass and wait for software to catch up with my triple core
If I misinterpret your statement correctly, you want to pay 4 times the money for a three-socket dual core setup that will have the same performance as a 6 core CPU?
I want bulldozer already and i refuse to upgrade my cpu until its released.
What kind of moron writes this garbage?
You know what I mean.
This is bad news for me and anyone else who has a reasonable budget, and had plans to build a high end system with the LGA1366 32nm processors. I don't know about anyone else but it definitely seems like Intel is starting to slack off with bringing their 32nm process to market. Lack of competition from AMD in the high end? No 32nm AMD processors for at least another year? Guess there's no real reason to rush... sucks for everyone.
Intel is crazy for some high power usage huh? P4 days here....
So what if it runs low power when idle, I'd like a CPU that doesn't require quad-rads with 1000rpm fans and its own line on my power bill.
that die picture makes it look suspiciously like 2 triple core's duck taped together
on the same die tho, and I'm not going to make the suggestion that I know ANYTHING about how that stuff works... I assume all 6 cores share the same pool of L3 cache?