Ready to 
First review of “Gulftown” Intel Core i9 appears
Robert Hallock
August 10, 2009 2:54 PM ET in Tech
We’ve been discussing Intel’s upcoming Gulftown for quite a while now. Tapped to succeed the Bloomfield (Core i7) at the top of Intel’s performance heap, the new Core i9-branded part will launch with a raft of enhancements to make sure it fills those shoes.
Gulftown’s membership in the 32nm Westmere family of architectures has allowed Intel to drop temps, boost cache, raise clockspeeds and increase the cores– six, to be exact. With a dash of HyperThreading and X58 compatibility, enthusiast desktops will be primed to chew through twelve concurrent threads when the chip debuts in early 2010.
While the details surrounding the chip have been available for quite some time, hard performance has remained elusive until today. HKEPC has recently published a small review that pits the Core i9 against a battery of tests, all of which paint it as an improvement to the Bloomfield.
To whet your appetite, here’s a snippet we’ve polished after Google spit it out:
In power consumption and temperature testing, the 32nm manufacturing process used by the Intel Gulftown offered amazing performance. Although Gulftown has six cores to the Bloomfield Core i7’s four, power consumption and temperatures are lower than the quad core. This proves that the next-generation 32nm manufacturing process is very mature.
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