Intel's Core i7-980X Extreme Edition 'Gulftown' review roundup
By Darren Murph 
posted March 11th 2010 12:06AM
posted March 11th 2010 12:06AM
As for the critics? Just about everyone with a benchmarking license managed to get one of these in-house, and everyone seems to feel (mostly) the same way. There's no denying that this is Intel's speediest consumer chip ever, but you won't find 50 percent boosts just anywhere. Yet. When the software catches up, though, there's no doubt that this chip will make even the other Core i7s look downright sluggish. 50 percent more cores and 50 percent more threads than the prior kings of the line leads to fantastic gains when serious number crunching is involved (audio and video editors, we're staring at you), with some tests showing upticks in the 30 to 50 percent range. As a bonus, the power consumption here is also extremely reasonable, with the shift to 32nm enabling it to even use less power in some circumstances when compared to the Core i7-975 Extreme Edition. Dig into the glut of reviews below if you've got a cool grand with "chip upgrade" written on it -- you'll be glad you did.
Read - Hot Hardware
Read - AnandTech
Read - Techgage
Read - Computer Shopper
Read - Bit-Tech
Read - PC Perspective
Read - Neoseeker
Read - Hardcoreware
Read - TweakTown
Read - PC World
Read - TechReport
Read - Benchmark Reviews
Read - Hardware Canucks
Read - Overclockers Club
Read - Hexus
Read - Legit Reviews
Must... not... buy...!
Argh, at 1000$ it's too much to justify. Especially considering there are zero performance gains. I'll either wait till it becomes really cheap or for the 8 cores expected to release in 2011.
@Special Agent Steve
Nehalem-EX (the 8-core) one isn't a desktop processor, and will probably be considerably over $1k...
@Special Agent Steve
But wow...later this year, that price will drop.
Forget the Xeon, just get this.
@Special Agent Steve I soo wish I could get this.....1000$$....:(
@Special Agent Steve
As with most anything in several months the non-Extreme models will trickle into the market with 6 cores and speeds most likely in line with the current i7 9xx models. These models will certainly be cheaper than $1000 and you can probably OC them to the same speed as this chip.
@KAL326
To be honest, I would be totally over this if I didn't JUST finish building my computer with an i7 920. It's OCed pretty well (3.7GHz- optimal performance), so I'm not feeling bad about my rig just yet. My next upgrade will probably be in the GPU department so I can get a shiny new DX11 card. Texture bumping will really make games look sick- like Crysis 2 :O
Wasn't it supposed to be called the i9 processor?
@Aurailious
Thought so, unless they're saving that for the 8 core version next year
Recession antidote?
Please?
@ferrell
Yeah I'm really excited to see some dude I don't know win the processor I'd kill for.
@ferrell Its been a long time since engadget has given anything away on the website =/ And I never see it announced who wins, I never see the winners come back and thank engadget and tell everyone how great it is that they won? wtf
@Hydra
conspiracy!!!!
I can't wait until Youtube has a 'how to' on installing one of these in my Dell Mini 10v ;-P
@Z
If you want to melt your laptop then go right ahead.
@Smoke Monster
It would melt... but for the momentary power... It would be pretty cool.
Does anyone remember that game - Project Offset? Wasn't it supposed to be released along side some kinda of kickass processor? Say this one?
Intel bought the developer making Project Offset and supposedly the game was supposed to launch alongside Larrabee, Intel's GPGPU. Intel planned to release the chip in 2010 but the project is currently on hold. Project Offset will likely release eventually; they released a trailer around a month ago which is a good sign that the game is still alive.
@caelroth
I have a cousin who was working as a concept artist for offset software when intel bought them. don't really know how far along they are with project offset but he says they play a lot of street fighter there!
OoooooooooooooOOOOooooo it's pretty XD.
What games that are CPU intensive?
I can see the use for content creators, especially those who earn money from it and thus could easily justify a $1000 CPU upgrade even if it's not wholly necessary.
@YpoCaramel
It's for people that need to play Crysis while encoding Bluray rips in MKV but can't get behind in their Folding time.
Core i7 980x. Never Compromise.
@COCOViper
and im buying 2. Just to be sure. ;)
APPLE GET ON YOUT SHIT PRONTO I WANT A NEW MAC PRO, AND I DON;T WANT TO BUY THE CURRENT ONE.
@Jehryan
all caps ftw
@Gi
YOU DAMN RIGHT
@Jehryan
I have the money in my hand.
And I hope the reason they haven't released it is because they are going to jam this CPU into the MacBook Air. And make it have a touch screen. That's all I ask. :)
@Jehryan
Guaranteed the new Mac Pros will be on the Gulftown platform and they may be announced as early as next week. You heard it here first.
Is it wrong that I wonder how overclockable it is?
@reallynotnick Yes its wrong, but yet so delightfully pleasant :)
@reallynotnick No, on most games it only averages an 8 to 10 FPS increase over the cheapest core i7 CPU, but the again these things have always been processors you buy just to say you own them.
So, uh, this would be a sex-core chip then, right?
Meh.
Wake me when they get to 64 cores.
@Gregorian
It could have a googol cores and your software still isn't going to take advantage of it.
EXTREME!!!!!
Think i might finally move up from my q9550 that i got running @ 3.61 with speedstep and C1E enabled.
Just waiting for the Newegg listing...
@ebotee
I am waiting for the counterfeit edition on Newegg and see how many will get screwed.
lolen.
I used to be excited about cpu development. But problems that are easy to parallelize can be better served by GPGPU via OpenCL or something.
The problems that are not, will likely remain bottlenecked by serialized code paths and individual effort to manually write and rewrite for each new generation of cpus. And even then, given a genius coder with too much time on his hands, I doubt there are many apps that could take advantage of 12-16 cores aren't better served by GPGPU - especially if said GPGPU happens to support native C++.
Parallelism needs to be solved at the hardware level, so many small compute resources can combine into one large compute resource and split in many other ways with granularity, and automatic abstraction.
But I have no idea what a cpu architecture of that sort would even look like. I just know that new cpu generations will be exciting when the mass of unwashed bedroom coders can spew simple code and have it run faster every year through hardware upgrades alone.
@Akhen
Several problems with GPGPU:
1. Each core still isn't as flexible or has some of the more advanced instructions that a cpu has.
2. Loading resources to gpu would probably kill performance as the latency of PCI-E is much higher than RAM to CPU. That's why most GPGPU applications are best for highly mathematical processes with a limited data set.
Also, let me get this straight, you want people to create a much more parallelized (since gpu's have more cores) algorithms and software when people are already having a harder time with the 'easier' and well-known bounds of a cpu?
@fisher
1.)Those extra instructions simply make things more efficient. The CPU processes one command that would require multiple commands if done otherwise. It doesn't add to flexibility. Everything can be done with +, -, /, *. It also reduces compiled code size. Both of these can be overcome with larger instruction caches and the shear flops of a GPGPU.
2.)Latency isn't a problem depending on problem and your computer hardware. For instance, if you have 1 GB of ram and 1 GB of GPU ram, you can simply feed all data required for the problem from the HDD/SSD through the system ram into the GPU ram. In this system, the ram to ram link is not the bottle neck, the HDD/SSD is. Anyways, if the GPU ram is used more like the system ram (certain cards have plenty of it), the ram to processor latency is not a problem for GPGPU.
@nate345
1. I'd like to see you do a recursion on a cuda device. It can do things, but not everything we're used to. Creating apps on a gpgpu requires a rethink of even some of the most basic things we could do with a cpu.
2. I have read before (I think it was on the ati's cal forums) that for every transfer you do, you do lose some of the performance as the device would waste cycles waiting for the transfer to complete. Incidentally the heaviest penalty is on the ram to vram copying as it passes through the PCI-E lane. If your application requires an insane amount of ram to vram copying then you could expect that you'd get nowhere near the advertised gflops.
Within the device though, transferring vram to caches is a lot faster. And if the data is always on the cache, then you'd probably get the gflops that were advertised.
This should be able to run GTA IV PC without any stuttering.
A dual-core chokes on this game and a quad-core is still not enough to tackle this game completely.
@michaspi true, however this speaks more to the horrible optimization and poor coding than to the game demand itself... I'm sure we can make pong run just as bad with the propper coding :)
AMD Bulldozer coming 2011...real 8 core CPUs with a brand new architecture...AMD prices...no need for Intel...
@bluefisch200
By then this will have trickled down to the lower end with the same overclocking ability AND it still beats native 8-core by four virtual cores, while consuming less power than your AMD chip.
Besides, the amount of system RAM in multiples of 3 instead of 2 is enough bragging right on its own.
@Ericloewe If you think like that then the Core 2 should be a fail...AMD has shown Intel what they can do with the Athlon and they can do it again...AMD will be back at the top with a completely new architecture of...and because Bulldozer will be build out of many 2 core modules they can create 12, 24, 100 Core CPUs extremely fast...also they can be the first who go over 4 Ghz...Bulldozer is very interesting...
Once they get this bad boy into a laptop, I'm upgrading.
Missed the one by Legit Reviews - http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1245/1/
They got it up to 4.2GHz... Impressive looking processor!
Come on AMD, you're rocking the GPU side, bring some serious competition to CPU now. I'm afraid Bulldozer will be too little, too late. Prove me wrong.
Falcon Northwest Mach V Core i7-980X
http://reviews.cnet.com/desktops/falcon-northwest-mach-v/4505-3118_7-33995807.html?tag=smallCarouselArea.1
why not buy a 700 $ CPU + 300 $ Graphic card instead ???