14 DAY TRIAL // Aside from the first line of Lynnfield-based processors, which are due out later this year, Intel, the world's leading vendor of computer chips, is also expected to announce its first line of 6-core processors, designed for the consumer market. Codenamed Gulftown, the upcoming pieces are expected to be launched early next year, under the Core i9 branding, providing users with increased performance and support for multi-threaded applications. On that note, computer enthusiast and overclocker JCornell has recently published a couple of pictures of what he claims to be Intel's upcoming 6-core processor.
The photos have surfaced on the xtremesystems forum, alongside screenshots of the new chips working on a Windows operating system. According to these images, the engineering samples that were available to JCcornell had a clock speed of 2.4GHz, featuring 12MB of shared L3 cache. There are still questions as to whether the screenshots and pictures of the new processors are real, but leaked details such as these do point to the upcoming launch of the much-anticipated CPUs.
There isn't much to go on for the time being but, according to the info provided by CPU-Z, said processors were running on an LGA 1366 platform and were built using Intel's next-generation 32nm manufacturing process. The system appears to be running on a dual-CPU platform and Intel's Multi-Threaded technology enabled, which could mean that we are dealing with a Xeon-based platform.
No overclocking was done on the upcoming Gulftown processors, but we could hear more as we approach the official launch date of the much-hyped CPUs. According to previous leaked details, these chips should make a debut in the first quarter of 2010, taking advantage of Intel's new 32nm manufacturing process and a new 6-core architecture.