Intel has a wide range of processors, but it looks like it is hard to make any changes to it without people immediately noticing, as it happened a short while ago, when it revealed a new six-core model.
That Intel was working on a central processing unit capable of overcoming the performance of one Core i7-970 is something that was more or less known since early May.
Turns out that the Santa Clara, California-based company really has been working on such a unit, one that has things in common with a different, stronger model, specifically the Core i7-980X Extreme Edition.
Named Core i7-980, it is faster than the i7-970 but, unlike the i7-980X, lacks an unlocked multiplier, meaning that it isn't fit for enthusiastic overclockers.
Then again, being a six-core unit with core clocks higher than that of most chips of today, not to mention featuring the Turbo Boost dynamically overclocking technology, the newcomer should easily be able to handle anything thrown at it, whether it be games in maximum settings or compute-intensive applications, benchmarking or otherwise.
For those that want specifics, the Core i7-980 has 12 threads and a L3 cache memory of 12 MB, plus a clock speed of 3.33 GHz.
As mentioned, Turbo Boost is present, meaning that the above mentioned frequency should be capable of jumping to the 3.6 GHz mark.
That said, the Core i7-980 is constructed on the 32nm manufacturing process technology but based on the Nehalem architecture.
In other words, this might just be the last chip that Intel releases for the LGA 1366 socket, since its roadmap doesn't include more such models.
Meanwhile, the Core i7-970 has been removed from Intel's price list. No other changes were made to said list, and with the price of $583 (the one that i7-970 had), this newcomer will handily take its place.
