The Gulftown CPU

With Gulftown Intel presents Bloomfields bigger brother which should show it's muscles especially in the high-end desktop market. In direct comparison to Bloomfield, Gulftown is equipped with two more cores respectively for additional threads. Also on board is Intels Turbo technology which is able to boost core clocks up to 3.6 GHz. Intels reasons for a Turbo-Mode which is able to dynamically overclock the CPU by up to 266 MHz or in other word two multiplyer steps is, that most of the software on the market is still not optimized for multithreaded CPUs and therefore the user mainly profits from higher clock speeds than massive parallelism.

Already with the Bloomfield Intel has been very proud of the scalability of Nehalems architecture, respectively the relative easyness to adapt the architecture to different markets. As a consequence it isn't a surprise that there haven't been many changes to the "Die" itself. The only conspicuity is the fact that the Gulftown CPUs carry about 400 million more transistors than their Bloomfield equivalents.