Intel Core i7-970

Until very recently, if you wanted a sixcore Intel desktop processor, you hadonly 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 i7- 970 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