Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Today's announcement really is the second part of Intel's early January launch, Clarkdale. However, contrary to that entry-level, mainstream part unveiled a few months ago, the Core i7-980X, previously known has Gulftown, is a top-of-the-line product. While it is also based on the Westmere architecture, built on Intel's 32nm manufacturing process, don't expect to find this one in the bargain bin anytime soon. Being an Extreme Edition processor for Intel usually involves a price point hovering above a thousand bucks and the 980X will be no exception to this rule once it hits the stores in the coming weeks."

Neoseeker have posted an in depth review of this top of the line six core Intel core i7 CPU which starts off with a nice, if technical explanation, of the CPU and it's history. This CPU is definitely aimed at the power users and gamers out there who want the best of the best. I can't imagine what I could run to use all of those six cores at once, but if you like to multitask such as encoding a video, playing music, watching a DVD, all while playing World of Warcraft then perhaps you might use them all! I don't know if it's just me, but it almost seems that CPU technology has moved on much faster than software has, and we are still waiting for the software to catch up and use the full potential of these new chips.

Every benchmark out there confirms it, but there's nothing like experiencing the results for yourself first-hand: a Dell Studio XPS computer equipped with a Core i7 CPU that I ordered a couple of weeks ago showed up a couple of days ago, and I immediately wanted to benchmark it to understand how in real-world scenarios it would provide a speed boost for the types of things I do, namely video and photo editing/encoding.

My current media editing rig is the one that I built back in September, based around a Shuttle SD39P2, and upgraded a bit since I wrote that article: a Core 2 Quad CPU (Q6600) overclocked to 2.8 Ghz and 4 GB of Kingston HyperX DDR2 RAM now power that system. Time to pit it against the new CPU from Intel: the Core i7. The Core i7 is a quad core CPU, but each core has hyperthreading enabled, so the right application can take advantage of up to eight threads of processing power. It also has 8 MB of cache, and is created with a 45nm process. The Core i7 is a truly next-gen processor - it's the "tock" of their tick-tock strategy for moving CPU technology forward and represents a significant leap forward form the 65nm Q6600 CPU I'm using now.

So how did I do a real-world benchmark on this beast of a processor? I installed ProShow Gold 4.0 because it scales really well to multiple processors. I loaded it up with 50 photos, and cranked out a 1080p (1920 x 1080) MPEG2 file with buttery-smooth transitions between each photo. I ran the same test on my Core 2 Quad CPU machine after down-clocking it to 2.67 Ghz, and compared the results...the Core i7 is one fast CPU! Read more...