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.
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