Six-Core Analysis, Part 2: Intel Core i7-980X Scaling
Intel's Turbo Boost technology provides a mechanism for improving system performance most significantly in lightly-threaded apps, even at peak loads. But what is the feature's impact on a Gulftown-based Core i7-980X processor with different core counts?
Benchmark Results: 3DMark And PCMark Vantage
3DMark Vantage’s CPU test also says that the performance gain per core is slightly larger than single-core performance. This is the case because multiple cores can work on shared L3 cache data together.
The GPU score doesn’t change much. Keep in mind that this only reflects gaming performance for older titles that can't utilize more than one processing core. Modern game titles also involve more complex AI systems and physics calculations. Both require CPU power that isn’t visible in this test.
Our overall 3DMark Vantage score gets close to what you see in real life.
The PCMark Vantage memory test echoes behavior that we saw on the AMD Phenom II X6. Two and three cores deliver better memory performance than a single core. It takes four or more cores to get close to the processor’s maximum result in PCMark Vantage.
PCMark Vantage’s overall result says that cores five and six don’t add much additional performance, partially because this result includes the 3D tests, which don’t benefit from multi-core CPUs in this benchmark. It's also worth noting that PCMark is comprised of apps from Windows, most of which seem optimized for four-core CPUs.
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