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.

Update 31 July, 2009: In the time since Intel announced its new branding initiative, the firm has wizened and kicked the impending 32nm Gulftown under the “Core i9″ banner. While the rest of their branding scheme remains inane as ever, it’s nice to see some clarity bubbling to the surface.

Original story follows:

Yesterday Intel Corp. announced a sweeping change to their branding which is every bit as confusing for the consumer as the branding it replaced.

The world’s largest CPU company announced the changes as a major pillar in a sweeping strategy allegedly designed to simplify branding for customers. Intel spokesman Bill Calder wrote that the Core branding currently suffered from an identity crisis at multiple levels.

“Today the Intel Core brand has a mind boggling array of derivatives (such as Core^TM2 Duo and Core 2 Quad, etc),” he said. “Over time those will go away and in its place will be a simplified family of Core processors spanning multiple levels.”

Intel’s new strategy is hinged on permutations of the “Core i7″ branding unveiled with the introduction of the firm’s new Nehalem family of architecture. Here’s how it works: (more…)

We did some digging around on Twitter today, and we’re pleased to inform that the Gulftown chip from the 32nm Westmere family will be X58-compatible.

With an expected release date of 4Q09/1Q10, the Gulftown is the successor to today’s Bloomfield core that serves the Core i7 920, 940 and 965 CPUs. Gulftown will continue in the tradition of QPI, DDR3, and tri-channel memory, but it should be a drop-in upgrade on X58 motherboards. The perk? It has six cores, not four.

In other news, if you’ve been waiting to see how Intel’s P55 chipset pans out, you might want to abort those plans. Intel confirmed that the next five chipsets to emerge from Intel HQ will be based on the LGA1156 socket. This socket will serve the upcoming Core i5 series, most notably composed of the Lynnfield core, which drops QPI and a memory channel in favor of the old frontside bus.

Don’t let this scare you, though. The “next five” claim probably refers to the ecosystem of P55-derived parts, such as the G55 and Q55. The P35 and P45 received a similar treatment to serve all its various market segments.

If we had to hazard a guess, we would say that Intel has adopted this tack to clearly stratify its enthusiast/mainstream market segments. We can only presume that Intel was unhappy with P35 and P45 cannibalizing significant sales of the X38 and X48. We can also presume that Intel was rather unhappy with speedbinned Core 2s adopting a massive following that all but sabotaged the sales of higher end parts.

Bless Twitter’s little heart.

Though the enthusiast community was atwitter with word that Intel’s 32nm process would reach retail availability by year’s end, they will be disappointed to learn that the enthusiast-level Gulftown chip and the 2P Gainestown successor have been pushed to 2010.

The word comes straight from Vice President of the Intel Digital Enterprise Group Stephen Smith. He has confirmed that the 32nm Gulftown, the enthusiast-oriented sexa-core variant of today’s Nehalem, won’t see the light of day until the first half of 2010. The server-oriented Clarksdale, a die-shrunk iteration of the recently announced Gainestown, is also taking the back seat and waiting for the first half of 2010.

Smith also confirmed that the Beckton, a 45nm octo-core Nehalem for 4 and 8-way servers has also been pushed back into next year.

While these moves are not expected to substantially harm the company’s current position in these markets, it does give AMD a sliver of wiggle room to capture the 4 and 8-way performance crowns for a spell.