Key Specs
Intel LGA1366Six
3.3GHz
Intel QuickPath Interconnect
12MB
Intel’s PC-processor competitor, AMD, has done well with its budget and mainstream CPUs, with products like the Athlon II X4 635 eking out a performance edge over Intel’s comparably priced Core i3-530. But at the high end of the CPU world, where absolute performance matters much more than consumer-friendly pricing, Intel is still the undisputed king. Its current Core i7 CPUs top anything AMD currently has on offer.
That continues with the latest Core i7 chip, the Core i7-980X Extreme Edition (code-named "Gulftown" during its development), which packs six cores and can handle up to 12 simultaneous processing threads. Intel has taken the next logical step in chip architecture by increasing the number of cores, and in doing so, the company has delivered another “world’s fastest CPU." Indeed, in programs that are fully threaded (that is, written to take full advantage of as many cores and threads as are available), the Core i7-980X is substantially faster than the previous CPU champ, the Core i7-975 Extreme Edition. But given the still-limited selection of software that is fully optimized to take advantage of multiple cores (most of them professional content-creation apps, media transcoders, and a few games), not to mention the stratospheric $1,000 price, this CPU is all kinds of overkill for the average user.
