Just this once,
DigiTimes has turned out to be spot on with
its prognostication. The six-core Core i7-970 rumor we heard earlier this month has now transmogrified into a retail product, and just as promised, it brings most of the goodies of the sublime
i7-980X at a moderately more affordable $899 price point. Based on the same 32nm Gulftown architecture as its costlier brother, the 970 will run at 3.2GHz by default, though presumably it too will be able to crank up speeds using Intel's
Turbo Boost. Aside from that, you get a healthy 12MB of on-chip cache and the standard triple-channel DDR3 memory controller. UK speed freaks can order one up as well now, clearly a tiny bit ahead of Intel itself making things official, so we'd advise checking with your nearest super-CPU purveyors in case they too have received some early units of this multithreaded code cruncher.
[Thanks, Polytonic]
posted July 19th 2010 2:38AM
That's like, really fast.
@Pryomancer
6 core processor...I think we will be having these run on our phones by 2013
@JonnyB Way too much heat for a phone. I think future systems will concentrate more on improving the efficiency to power ratio. Think max of dual core, but much more cache and more threads.
@Pryomancer Why was that downranked? Six cores are barely on desktops. Even if they were to appear on phones, despite the phone sector moving as rapidly as it does, it would be for at least 5 years, probably longer.
As cool as it would be, I doubt it would happen.
@Pryomancer
ladies and gentlemen, mr. negative Nancy.
@JonnyB
Tegra already has 6 various cores.
@Pryomancer
Really fast sure... More monies than my Car? Yes!
But can it drive me places!? No it cannot.. Once it grows wheels and I can ride it like a crotch rocket, I will endeavor upon one of these.
@Blackflag486 If you have to ride something to justify its usefulness or price then maybe you should be in porn.
@JonnyB made by ARM most likely. Hopefully by that the phone's will also have the battery life that phones are dying to have now.
Moderately affordable $899 price point? That's a freaking miracle!
@Mmmm Donuts
I just got an i7 930 for $200, and I can barely count that as affordable.
@M C For a top of the line cpu $200 is nothing
The price tag is hexa too.
@Mmmm Donuts
Only $100 cheaper than its 3.33GHz highly overclock-able Extreme Edition counter-part... Not really worth getting this.
I guess that's what happens when they refuse to push older 2/4 core processor prices down...
@M C
@Mmmm Donuts
..very expensive
fap fap fap fap
@MrFairladyz
Everything feels faster, doesn't it?
@MrFairladyz
Hello there Mr. 2-minute-man.
Give me a hexacore at $300 and I'll buy it.
Yes, I know AMD has a hexacore for $300.
@einhanderkiller
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103849
There you go. Althought I prefer intel myself, you have to admit that AMD freaking rocks on the price tag.
@einhanderkiller
Here is a six core that is under $200
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103851
@k2001
That is incredibly tempting. I have an Intel E4500 Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz (Overclocked to 2.9 GHz.) Just exactly how many times would that kick it's ass should I buy that (with the required motherboard and likely memory?) Also, hows the overclocking?
@Dafrety
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNhQaZoSHM8
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/31407-amd-phenom-ii-x6-1055t-1090t-six-core-processors-review.html
Considering the Black edition is only 100 dollars more, why not save up a bit more and get that.
@Dafrety
@Dafrety
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNhQaZoSHM8
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/31407-amd-phenom-ii-x6-1055t-1090t-six-core-processors-review.html
Considering the Black edition is only 100 dollars more, why not save up a bit more and get that.
Whoa - The Power... THE POWER!
1 core per inch of my epeen dong
hyper-thread it and, well lets just be modest and say I have an internet meat sword.
@rmbrown09
My god...you're a complete and utter moron.
nice
Just out of curiosity. What kind of programs take advantage of the extra cores?
@Vuke
The good kind.
@Vuke The expensive kind
@Vuke
Most professional grade software suites. Adobe CS5 Master Collection, LabVIEW 2010, SolidWorks 2010, Mathematica 7.0, and MATLAB, just to name a few.
@Vuke All that matters is if its a multithreaded program or not, not specifically about 2, 3, 4, or 6 cores.
This is far superior to the craptastic Intel V8 setup though with two quads and its inherent memory limitations, high pricetag, and inability to overclock.
Felt so good when I pwned my buddies Mac Pro in most of our tests with my much cheaper overclocked single quadcore, thanks to faster memory and an extra gigaherz on him. Will be interesting to see what kind of overhead this six-core has. :D
@Vuke
The programs that actually need a lot of CPU power.
Your browser or office suite don't really need it. Even most games don't need that much CPU power and rely on stronger GPUs instead.
But if you look at audio/video editing programs etc. you'll find out that the vast majority of them take advantage of multiple cores. (Some better than others and in different ways - you should always look at every program in particular to know if and how much you'll gain with a six core, for example.)
Must I remind everyone here that unless your rig is packing SSDs, this CPU means nothing, right? The biggest bottleneck for any type of computer nowadays is the speed of the hard drive. I find it downright shameful that people at tech savvy blogs like engadget buy this but keep their crappy old-school platter HDDs.
Just my two cents :P
@vvtopkar No, many activities, such as video encoding and gaming, for example, only need a certain amount of disk IO. Both examples of activities that are generally CPU (and/or GPU) bound.
@vvtopkar
So I can safely presume you are typing that using an old pentium 2 computer or something with a SSD plugged in, probably with something like a SATA to IDE converter, right?
Sure, somebody who is only using their computer to check their email or type up a few documents might benefit more from an SSD over a hexacore CPU, but if someone is running a few CPU intensive tasks at once, when the programs have finished loading it doesn't matter what type of storage they load off of, it's more about the processor But since you posted on a tech-savvy blog, you already knew that, right?.
(yeah yeah, obvious troll is obvious)
@vvtopkar HOW WRONG CAN ONE BE???
HD's are not the bottle neck on most systems and if they are then we are talking about either copying files, Decompressing files or transferring them most of the time the CPU/GPU/RAM/Mobo are the ones doing the heavy lifting. 2 hours of BF BC2 has not had my HD light blink for more then a few milliseconds here and there. It sure as hell is not a major system bottle-necker during long time heavy duty operations.
This thing is just waiting to ravage your motherboard and tear it asunder and even after your PC melts down to nothing but ash, the hexacore will remain intact....
@Plazmic Flame
YEEEEESSSSSSSSSSS!!! This is awesome. Looking forward to making that gaming rig even more now! Thanks Intel.
Who would want to buy this, considering that the faster, more overclock-friendly i7-975 costs only $80 more on Newegg (and comes with a free game!).
@coolbho3000 If you're buying a $300 processor, I can understand not wanting to spend $80 more. But come on, if you're going to spend $900 for a CPU, you might as well go all the way. They're both hexacore, 32nm processors.
@coolbho3000 I stand corrected - the 975 is not hexacore, the 980X is (wow, that's really confusing - the 970 is faster than the 975). But even the 980X is only $999 versus $899.
@coolbho3000
I hope you meant to type 980X instead of the 975EE.
@nascasho Corrected myself a split second before you did. :)
@coolbho3000
intel's extreme and high end processors are still freakishly expensive.
how is it the quad core 975 is still about £780, while the 6 core 980x is like £800?
The price will come down in time, its just a good sign of things to come !