At the Games Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, chip giant Intel has unveiled its new flagship, the Core i7-980x. The Extreme Edition processor with six cores, but with hyper-threading and virtual, it is even twelve. Intel is the first chip manufacturer, Hexa-core CPUs for desktop PCs offers.

Developed under the codename Gulftown Core i7-980x is a 32-nanometer production process and is intended for use with the Socket 1366. Therefore, it can be reused after a BIOS update an existing motherboard with the X58 Express chipset, which makes an attractive upgrade.

The clock frequency of the Core i7-980x is at 3.33 GHz, in the turbo mode at 3.60 GHz. It is equipped with a triple channel DDR3 (1066MHz) memory controller, the TDP is 130 watts. Compared with the previous Core i7-975X Core i7 has 980x more than 6 instead of 4 processor cores and over 12 instead of 8 MB L3 cache.

The six physical (core and hyper threading through virtually twelve) CPU cores, Intel’s i7 980x let him put it significantly faster than quad-core processors, but there are hardly any software that can exploit this. In general, the software vendors are lagging with regard to the use of multi-core technology has long afterward, so the investment in processors with many cores in many cases not worth it.