Intel Core i7 –970

 

Until very recently, if you wanted a six­core Intel desktop processor, you had only one speed bin and model to choose from: the pricey 3.33GHz Core i7-980X Extreme Edition. However, in the past couple of months, Intel decided to intro­duce a slightly more affordable six-core chip, the Core i7-970. This new hexa-core beast, like the 980X, is built on Intel's new 32nm process and clocks in not so far behind at 3.2GHz. Its top Turbo Boost speed is 3.46GHz, compared to the 980X's 3.6GHz, and its QPI link speed is set to 4.8GTps vs. 6.4GTps for the 980X, the latter of which won't hamper performance much, if at all. The 970 also has 12MB of shared L3 cache, just like its more expen­sive six-core sibling. Built with Intel Hyper-Threading technology, the chip is able to offer 12 threads of processing resources to the OS. Also like the previous Core i7 six-core release, this chip will drop into existing Socket LGA1366 motherboards, though you might need to grab the latest BIOS update to support the new chip microcode. From a performance standpoint, for single­or lightly threaded workloads, the Core i7­970 lines up slightly behind a quad-core Core i7-975. However, in multithreaded applications that make use of the chip's extra cores, the Core i7-970 is up to 50% faster than its nearest quad-core counterpart and within about 5 to 7% of the 980X. The Core i7-970 doesn't carry such an extreme price, retailing around $885, mak­ing it a great "budget" chip if you want six cores of Intel processing power .