Intel 980x Gulftown
Synthetic Benchmarks
Published: 12th March 2010 | Source: Intel | Price: £850 - estimated |
Synthetic Benchmarks
For todays testing we will be using the 980 at stock speeds, the 980 at our stable overclock, and because the 980 is a hexcore and the latest iteration of the premium i7 Intel CPU, we'll also be running against the i7 965 to see not only whether the 2 extra cores and 4mb extra L3 cache make a difference in certain applications and tests, but also if the 32nm shrink has given us performance in those applications that don't utilise all cores.
wPrime
With a new breed of CPUs, it's time for a new test. Today we're going to be using wPrime. I can't begin to describe it as well as the creator, and so I'll leave it up to him to explain what it does. "wPrime tests your processor performance by calculating square roots with a recursive call of Newton's method for estimating functions, with f(x)=x2-k, where k is the number we're sqrting, until Sgn(f(x)/f'(x)) does not equal that of the previous iteration, starting with an estimation of k/2. It then uses an iterative calling of the estimation method a set amount of times to increase the accuracy of the results. It then confirms that n(k)2=k to ensure the calculation was correct. It repeats this for all numbers from 1 to the requested maximum". I hope you're all nodding at home.
Demonstrating the quality of this benchmark and how well it scales with the amount of cores and clockspeed available we can see the extra 2 cores of the 980 give us around 33% extra performance. This moves up to an incredible 50% when the 980 is overclocked.
Sisoft Sandra
Sandra is a great test of a CPUs performance and so we'll be using the CPU Arithmetic tests to see how much horsepower we have here. The pure and simple answer is, plenty. Easily breaking the 100 GFLOPS mark with the overclocked 980 again proving twice as fast as the previously speedy 965.
Everest Ultimate
Everest provides four very good CPU tests that we'll be using today. CPU Queen is the standard chess solving benchmark, PhotoWorxx gives a synthetic reproduction of photo editing and Zlib tests compression. There is also a test for AES Encryption, but we'll discuss that below.
For the Gulftown upgrade from the current i7s Intel have implemented hardware accelerated AES encryption. The benefits of this might not be immediately apparent until you look at the graph below. If you're not impressed you're dead from the neck up.
Most Recent Comments
Blimey that's a bit of kit. Dear Santa
So wish I could afford to splurge on one of these, I wouldn't have to upgrade for tiiiiime.
Maybe with some ATI 5870's in crossfire, or Nvidia equivalents we could see 80 frames + from crysis
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Originally Posted by name='BloomerzUK'
OT: Love the avatar Tom.
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No way will it be worth it buying it. and there is no way on earth any one here is going to need that much power except for good scores on test benches and braging rights wich means naff all in real world.
Thats like getting a car to compenswte for the fact you cannot be good in another department.
still good good review though but way out of my budget range and some thing ill never own unless OC3d are gving it away as a ""PRIZE"" hint hint ....lol
Great review btw.
Out of interest, did you manage to get a Super PI 1m at all? I just want to see some pwnage
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Originally Posted by name='alexhull24'
Some serious power, I enjoyed the review tom. Cost is the problem here though, but this is always the case with bleeding edge hardware. Most of us have to wait for it to trickle down into our price range, which doesn't usually take long.
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Originally Posted by name='mayhem'
£850 est. come on guyes thats raly taking the piss.
No way will it be worth it buying it. and there is no way on earth any one here is going to need that much power except for good scores on test benches and braging rights wich means naff all in real world. Thats like getting a car to compenswte for the fact you cannot be good in another department. still good good review though but way out of my budget range and some thing ill never own unless OC3d are gving it away as a ""PRIZE"" hint hint ....lol |
6x cpus are allowing those at the top end of benchmarking to exploit their donations at this point. We've already seen this week Shamino cream the 3dMark Vantage record by some 5000 points with a single 'retail' GTX480 in one run, but my argument would be that with a 4x cpu, or his 6x with a 5870, would it only be a few thousand.
It's going to take a long time, imo, for these Intel offerings to calm down on the pricing stake. Maybe it'll take a really good AMD 8x to do it, but as far as extreme top-end cpus go for pricing, I can remember my QX9650 being priced at less than half of this.
If ur thinking 980x will remain the top cpu for these sockets forever, then u can appreciate it being £1k - but I somehow doubt that with Intel sticking with this socket set for a good few years to come, that the 980x will be the top end for it's duration.
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