Thursday, March 25, 2010

6-core (HexaCore) Intel Core i7 "Gulftown" Scores - Update

Update : 6-core i7 'Gulftown' 980X LGA1366 Everest Processor Cache benchmark:


As mentioned in our previous post here, we'll be running some benchmarks to give you the performance numbers of Intel's latest flagship desktop processor, the 6-core (HexaCore) Core i7 'Gulftown' LGA1366 processor. So without further ado - here are the scores we got running on the same Intel X58 board (with updated BIOS of course!) - Wow, we actually did something we said! :)

6 cores x HT (Hyper-Threading) = 12 'processors'

Told you it's still called an i7 (albeit an Extreme Edition version), and not the i9 as we hoped!

Level 1 and 2 Caches are x6 obviously - but the 6cores also share a unified 12MB Level 3 Cache

See, told you it'll still work on the same old X58 board - you just need to update the BIOS

On an idle x64 (64-bit) Windows 6.1 (Win7) desktop, the HexaCore runs @ 65 degrees Celsius using a Thermalright U120E-RT LGA1366 processor cooler:

So what does Windows 6x (Vista = Windows 6.0, Win7 = Windows 6.1) Experience Index say about the 6core i7? Well apparently when coupled with a GeForce 285 GTX and 6GB of memory, the slowest hardware component will be an SSD (Solid State Drive) - believe it or not!

Windows' 6x XP Index reports the 6core as 7.7 out of 7.9, 6GB memory as 7.7 out of 7.9, GeForce 285 graphics as 7.4 out of 7.9, and SSD as 5.9 out of 7.9

So what does Futuremark's PCMark 2005 1.2 Professional say?

How about Futuremark's 3DMark Vantage 1.0.2 Professional?

Note we didn't run the 3DMV graphics test since we're just testing the 6core here

Looks good so far - let's try some non-industry standard benchmarks like Everest and Performance Test. Note the following screen captures couldn't be re-sized to fit the width of BrickTech without it being too small to read, so we've maintained it's actual captured size. Just click to see the original size.

This is Everest results, and the following 2 are Performance Test results

All these benchmarking and testing software are freely available so feel free to do comparison with your own hardware (or others) to gauge the performance of the 6core i7 compared to existing desktop processors. We'll try and update this post with comparison scores later. Really!

More Data?