Gulftown (microprocessor)

Gulftown or Westmere-EP is the codename of a six-core hyperthreaded Intel processor able to run up to 12 threads in parallel. It is based on Westmere microarchitecture, the 32 nm shrink of Nehalem. Originally rumored to be called the Intel Core i9, it is sold as an Intel Core i7. The first release was the Core i7 980X in the first quarter of 2010, while its server versions are the Xeon 3600- and 5600-series. The i7-970 has recently been released, with a 24x locked multiplier.



First figures indicate that at equivalent clock rates, depending on the software, it has up to 50% higher performance than the identically clocked quad core Bloomfield Core i7 975. However, consumer software that utilizes 6 real and 6 virtual cores is still quite rare, and not every multithreaded program is able to take advantage of this many cores. Despite having 50% more transistors, the CPU strongly benefits from the 32-nm process, drawing the same or even less power (depending on the operating system) than its Bloomfield predecessors with merely four cores. The thermal design power (TDP) of all planned models is stated to be 130 watts.

Gulftown is the first six-core dual-socket processor from Intel, following the quad-core Bloomfield and Gainestown (a.k.a. Nehalem-EP) processors using the same LGA 1366 package, while the earlier Dunnington six-core processor is a Socket 604 based multi-socket processor. The CPUID extended model number is 44 (2Ch) and two product codes are used, 80613 for the UP desktop/server models and 80614 for the Xeon 5600-series DP server models. In some models, only four of the six cores are enabled.