Intel Core i9 much faster and cooler than Core i7

Polish tech site PCLab had the opportunity to test the Intel Core i9 "Gulftown" processor, this is the first 32nm six-core chip from Intel. The processor is expected to be released in Q1 2010, the chip received by PCLab is an engineering sample so keep in mind that the performance of the retail models will likely be even better. You can check out the article over here.

The Gulftown was clocked at 2.8GHz and compared to Core i7, Core i5, Core 2 Quad and Phenom II X4 processors with the same clockspeed. The performance of this early engineering sample is pretty good, in some tests the chip is 50 percent faster clock-for-clock than the Core i7. In real-world gaming benchmarks the differences aren't that great, but the engineering sample still performs about 5-7 percent better than the Core i7.

The site also tested power consumption and temperatures. Intel's 32nm process seems to perform really well, it's more efficient than the Core i7 and runs very cool. The chip used 24W less in load then the Core i7 and reached a temperature of only 42°C in load!

The four extra threads give a slight advantage to Gulftown over Core i7. As shown in the simulation of particle effects in the Source engine, some parts of the game code can be parallelized with good effect. But Left4Dead based on the same engine clearly shows that this is of little help in gaming – the number of frames per second is determined by the rest of the code, unfortunately most often single- or dual-threaded. The LGA1366 processors’ low score on Left4Dead is an anomaly resulting from an error in the Nvidia drivers and does not occur any more with the latest driver versions.