Intel Core i7-980X Review - PAGE 1

Today's announcement really is the second part of Intel's early January launch, Clarkdale. However, contrary to that entry-level, mainstream part unveiled a few months ago, the Core i7-980X, previously known has Gulftown, is a top-of-the-line product. While it is also based on the Westmere architecture, built on Intel's 32nm manufacturing process, don't expect to find this one in the bargain bin anytime soon. Being an Extreme Edition processor for Intel usually involves a price point hovering above a thousand bucks and the 980X will be no exception to this rule once it hits the stores in the coming weeks.

That niche price point has been well covered by the Core i7-975, which was released in June last year and merely was a clock speed bump of the 965, introduced way back then in November 2008. If you thought these four core, eight threads mamooths were powerful, the 980X bumps those figures by 50% to become a beastly 6-core, 12-thread processing powerhouse.

Basically, take three Clarkdale processors, stick them side by side on a LGA1366 package and you end up with Gulftown. Of course, there's some more engineering thrown into the mix, but Gulftown doesn't add anything fundamentally new to Intel's record. Before going any further, let's take a look at their current bottom-to-top lineup.

	G6950	530	540	650	660	661	670	750	860	870	920	960	975	980X
Clock Speed	2.80	2.93	3.06	3.2	3.33		3.46	2.66	2.80	2.93	2.66	3.20	3.33
Max. Turbo Freq.	N/A			3.46	3.6		3.73	3.2	3.46	3.60	2.93	3.46	3.60
IGP Clock Speed	533	733				900	733	N/A
Cores / Threads	2 / 2	2 / 4						4 / 4	4 / 8					6 / 12
Cache	3MB	4MB						8MB						12MB
Memory Speed	1066 MHz	1333 MHz									1066 MHz
TDP	73W					87W	73W	95W			130W
Transistor Count	383 M (CPU) / 177 M (GPU)							774 M			731 M			1.17 B
Die Size	81 mm2 (CPU) / 114mm2 (GPU)							296mm2			263mm2			248mm2
Architecture	Westmere							Lynnfield			Nehalem			Westmere
Process	32nm							45nm						32nm

There are few subtle, but major differences with Clarkdale which make Gulftown more than just three Core i5-600 glued together. First off, they moved the memory controller back on the core, where it should have been in the first place. If you recall, the IMC on Clarkdale is on the integrated graphics and memory bandwidth and latency suffered heavily. Secondly, since it's branded as a Core i7, it has a full fledged, triple channel DDR3 memory interface. The third and last major difference with Clarkdale is that Gulftown is powered by X58 so the PCI-Express lanes are on the chipset and not on the graphics core. These improvements over the cheaper Clarkdale cores should net the Core i7-980X over three times more performance in intensive, multi-threaded tasks.

Clarkdale versus Gulftown

While Gulftown shares the core with Clarkdale, it borrows Nehalem's platform -- X58. Other than that, Gulftown still packs Turbo Boost, which can increase the core frequency up to 3.6 GHz in single threaded applications, and HyperThreading is still on board for these largely parallel programs, allowing the 6 cores to process up to 12 threads at a time. The cache architecture remains unchanged -- 2MB for every core, although it can be allocated dynamically so if a core needs more than that, it can borrow some from another. Intel officially supports DDR3 memory at 1066 MHz, but rest assured, we've seen memory run at about twice that with relative ease.

The next few figures are pretty interesting from a technical point of view. While the 980X has two more cores than it's Nehalem siblings, Intel kept the TDP in check at 130W. While power consumption is still up there and represents a fairly high amount of heat to dissipate, it's impressive to be able to squeeze two more cores under than same TDP with a simple die shrink. At a whooping 1.17 billion transistors, Gufltown is the first desktop processor to crush the billion mark. Thanks to the 32nm manufacturing process, Gulftown is in fact smaller than first generation Nehalem processors built on 45nm even though it trails in transistor count by over 400 million.

Like I said earlier, the Core i7-980X utilizes the same old X58 chipset -- if it ain't broke, don't fix it! A refresh would've been interesting, but, as a consumer, backward compability is a great move by Intel. The processor is expensive, yes, but at least they aren't requiring a brand new platform. Power is now in the motherboard manufacturers hand to provide BIOS support and from what we've seen so far, most of them have made the jump. Let's take a quick glance at the platform anyway.

On the gaming side of things, X58 paves the way for dual, triple and even quad graphics card configurations with 32 PCi-Express 2.0 lanes. If you've been holding off for a native USB 3.0 and SATA 6 Gbps implementation on an Intel solution, this is not going to happen until Sandy Bridge or about a year from now. Until then, you'll have to settle with 12 USB 2.0 ports, 6 SATA 3 Gbps ports, gigabit LAN, high definition audio and 6 PCI-Express 1.0 lanes. These lanes are used by motherboard manufacturers to bring next-generation USB and SATA ports onboard so we don't entirely rely on Intel.

With that data in mind, lets take a look at the Core i7-980X and its accompanying hardware.