The Gulftown CPU

With Gulftown Intel presents Bloomfields bigger brother which should show it's muscles especially in the high-end desktop market. Looking at the Core i7 990 X Intel decided to choose a higher default multiplier. Therefore this native six core CPU now clocks with 3.46 GHz. As soon as the Turbo kicks in the CPU is being overclocked by another two multiplier steps or in other words 266 MHz. In this case the CPU is going to operate at 3.73 GHz. Like its predecessor also the Core i7 990 X comes with hyperthreading and you'll therefore see a total of twelve threads in Windows task manager.

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.