Intel's six-core Gulftown is performing well

Analysis: Likely to appear earlier than expected.

Two months ago, certain websites in the Far East showed early sample runs of Gulftown, the upcoming six-core 32nm processor that Intel will release in 2010. Originally expected to appear in the second quarter of next year, this flagship of the Westmere generation should ensure that the LGA1366 socket parts keep the substantial performance and price advantages over their more mainstream LGA1156 socket brethren.

On top of that, it would still be pin and - BIOS allowing - plug compatible with most current LGA1366 mainboards, but allow quite a bit of extra system level performance if used with newly tuned mainboard revisions and updated Tylersburg chipset steppings. In fact, you might not even need new mainboards in many cases, as the memory and QPI speed improvements are usually mostly related to the CPU uncore parts anyway.

Earlier site previews showed this new CPU running at only 2.4GHz with DDR3-1066 memory, surprisingly slow knowing it's a new process and basically an improvement on very well known and tested core and uncore designs by now. To me, that didn't sound exactly right since the combination of a newer manufacturing process and more time the designers had to further tune up both the core and uncore portions of the CPU should have resulted in more performance with more cores and more clock speed too.

So, when visiting Taipei a week ago, and speaking with two large vendors involved, I was happy to have them share their first experiences with the recent A-0 stepping deliveries of the Gulftown CPUs in both UP desktop and DP workstation slash server versions. Each of the two vendors has received around two dozen samples, and it was interesting to compare the frequency headroom they saw as well as stability and performance spread across the samples they had on a variety of mainboards.

Good news, most of the samples hit close to 3.5GHz with regular voltages, and around 4GHz with basic "push up" measures (we'll avoid saying "overclocking" among the vendors). And this is with six cores and 12MB cache per chip, a full 50 per cent increase in both categories from the current LGA1366 45nm processors, with roughly the same thermal design power (TDP) rating as well. Oh yes, also don't forget the encryption acceleration as well as little reductions to latency penalties all over the system.

The memory controller actually does perform better, too. Expect fairly easy triple channel DDR3-2133 operation on the desktop - and some more if you're a hard core overclocker - as well as standard DDR3-1600 ECC server memory at three channels per CPU socket. In fact, most of the new server and workstation mainboard revisions, according to our designer friends, will support a working "Force DDR3 1600 speed" option across all 12 DIMM sockets in a dual CPU system. If the memory is good enough, of course.For the expected one or two dual-CPU overclockable board entries to take the domain previously covered by the Intel Skulltrail, the potential, with desktop high-end memory, is to have six channels of DDR3-2133 memory in parallel, on a 4.27GHz capable pair of Gulftowns with the right cooling. Our favourite - and hated by some commenters - Sandra memory bandwidth benchmark would surely yield some fabulous results then, north of 60GBps measured bandwidth.