The Core i7 980X Review: Intel's First 6-Core Desktop CPU

Final Words

I have to say that Intel's Core i7 980X is the first Extreme Edition CPU that I've ever gotten excited about. In the past you used to have to choose between more cores or high clock speeds. Thanks to power gating and Gulftown's PMU, those days are over. The 980X gives you its best regardless of what you throw at it. Lightly threaded apps benefit from the larger L3 cache and heavily threaded apps take advantage of the extra cores. The performance advantage you get at the low end ranges from 0 - 7%, and on the high end with well threaded code you're looking at an extra 20 - 50% over the Core i7 975. Even more if you compare to a pedestrian processor. There are a few cases where the 980X does lose out to the Core i7 975 thanks to its higher latency L3 cache, but for the most part it's smooth sailling for the 6-core beast.

The performance advantage comes at no extra power cost either. Enabling 6 cores on a 32nm process means that the die actually got smaller and power consumption remained mostly unchanged. It really is the best of both worlds, at least for a 130W chip. It's almost Conroe-like in its ability to dominate the charts without any technical limitations. If money were no object, the Core i7 980X is clearly the best you can get.

The only problem is price, as is always the case with these Extreme Edition processors. While I don't expect 6-core CPUs to trickle down to the mainstream, if we had a version priced at ~$500 it would be an amazingly easy sell. I wonder where Intel will price the Core i7 970, allegedly also a 6-core Gulftown derivative. We'll have to wait another quarter to find out.

Even taking into account price, if you do any significant amount of compute intensive 3D work, video encoding or Excel modeling, the Core i7 980X is worth it. If you're the type of user who always buys the Extreme Edition knowing that you can get better bang for your buck further down the lineup, this time you're actually getting your money's worth. On the desktop, the next 12 months are fairly stagnant in terms of CPU performance improvements. We'll see a clock bump to the 980X at the beginning of 2011, but it'll be even longer before we get a replacement.

There is of course the higher powered alternative. You could pick up a dual-socket Xeon board and a pair of quad-core Nehalem Xeons for a bit more than a X58 + 980X. You'd end up with more cores, albeit with a higher power budget and higher price tag. The Core i7 980X is such a difficult processor to recommend. It's something I'd personally never spend the money on. But if I needed more compute in a single chip, it's really the only thing that could scratch that itch.