Gulftown in all it's subtle glory...

That's right folks, some early tests of some 6-core goodness awaits you - Gulftown benchmarked.

Performance appears to be on par for what you'd expect -- with the 2 extra cores you can expect up to a 50% gain in highly threaded apps, which unfortunately are few and far between. In more typical scenarios things are much closer to i7 (as you would expect.)

The Gulftown processor can be briefly summarized using a military concept: shock and awe. Twelve threads and huge bandwidth put on a show of incredible computing performance. It is just that if Gulftown is the shock and awe, most readers are the citizens of a neighboring country that does not take part in the conflict. In domestic applications, with gaming on top, the four extra threads are of little importance to the efficiency and comfort. Core i7-900 is not the best processor for gamers and the new six-core is not much faster clock-to-clock. Gulftown is a processor for servers and workstations, not for gamers.