14 DAY TRIAL // It appears that, while the majority of news involving Intel is of the Sandy bridge CPU lineup, the company is not yet done with a certain other type of CPU, the Gulftown to be more precise, as proven by alleged listings.
Some time ago, Intel was the first company to release a consumer-oriented central processing unit with six cores, albeit one that was hardly easy on the finances, what with its price of $999.
Nevertheless, that Gulftown was still the only available six-core chip for quite a few months, before AMD Finally released its Thubans.
Now, it would appear that the Santa Clara, California-based company has completed the development of yet another Gulftown CPU.
Granted, the outfit did not issue any press announcements about it recently. Still, the fact remains that, according to a certain report, the newcomer has already been listed by certain retailers from Poland.
Several OEMs supposedly have it as an option in their high-end rigs already, but retail shipments had yet to commence.
It is dubbed Core i7-990X and has all of its six cores operating at the very ambitious speed of 3.46 GHz, although Turbo Boost can take the number all the way up to 3.6 GHz.
For those that do not remember, Turbo Boost can downclock or turn off unused cores in order to boost the frequencies of used ones while staying within the TDP limit.
Speaking of thermal design power, the new Gulftown consumes 130W.
Other specifications include 256 KB of L2 cache memory for each core (6 x 256 KB), while the L3 cache is of 12 MB.
All the above are accompanied by a price tag of 900 Euro. What remains to be seen is how well it sells until its maker replaces all Gulftowns with Sandy Bridge E units, a move intended to happen in the third quarter.