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3.2ghz Bloomfield vs 3.2ghz Gulftown i7 !!?

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HI,

Kinda new to the forums, I've asked a few questions and answered when I can. Just been doing some eye shopping on the site like im sure a lot do.

Just sold my athlon ii x4 930 2.8ghz for £60 and won a phenom ii x4 3.0ghz for £80 at a online auction site, thought it was a worthwhile upgrade for £20.

During my eye shopping came across the above processors. The bloomfield 3.2ghz at £449 and the gulftown 3.2ghz at £705.99. I noticed the first has 8mb level 3 cache the second 12mb.

I done some searching, Im still trying to understand as much as poss, but I seriously don't get this.

Like is there any real difference you would notice, also theres a £200 difference between the 3.2ghz bloomfield and the 2.9ghz Llyinfield, both with 8mb level cache, other than clock speed, no other difference I notice other than price.

£200 would buy you a 1090t 3.2ghz 6 core phenom ii. Im not tryin to suggest its wrong, just trying to get the tech behind what justify's the price difference between em, Any one know?
 
Bloomfield is an i7 with 4 cores and hyperthreading so logically 8, Gulftown is on a smaller manufacturing process (32nm vs 45nm) and features 6 cores and hyperthreading.

A 6 Core phenom ie 1035/1055/1075/1090T will perform clock for clock the same as a bloomfield i7 due to a more efficient architecture on Intels part.

Lynnfield is aimed at mainstream users whereas Bloomfield and Gulftown are aimed at the enthusiast and corporate markets. Bloomfield and gulftown offer triple channel memory and better support for multiple GPUs (8x/8x vs 16x16).
 
Ahh I kinda see what your saying. If you got the cash, and your looking for the advantage in triple channel memory and faster sli/xfire support then thats what these processors will offer you.

But is their any real application or game that these processors will offer an advantage to over the 2.9ghz Llynnfield for the £200 extra or the 3.2 bloomfield or the extra £450 3.2 Gulftown. As in the extra power they offer, is their any application or game that cannot max out with the 2.9ghz Llynfield with a decent rig behind it?
 
Hi there,

To be honest - £449 is a really bad price for a Bloomfield chip, this 3.06GHz model only costs £245 (has been as low as £211 before) and apart from the locked multiplier - it is the same chip as the 3.2GHz one.

As mentioned by frozennova, the Gulftown is has 6 physical cores and 12 threads. It is basically a Bloomfield with 50% extra thrown in. Each core is just as fast as a bloomfield - but there are 6 of them instead of 4.

In terms of what they are needed for - games do not need this level of power at the moment even the lynnfield chips are overkill (an i5 760 can handle any game you throw at it - it is more to do with the GPU). However, it is the CPU heavy, multithreaded applications where the Bloomfield and Gulftown chips really shine. In applications like encoding, rendering and image/video/audio editing these CPUs prove their worth. This test shows the performance of a range of CPUs in a CPU heavy task (encoding).


That said, they are still very expensive and the performance gains over a lynnfield i5 or a Phenom II X4 are not earth shattering. Hence someone buying one of these chips will usually have a planned use that will make use of the extra power in these applications, so they can justify to themselves the extra expense.
 
Ahh, so the power is noticeable in the real world. The hyperthreading (twice the treads) is noticable in video editing, and I assume programs like extreme image editing and 3d model design (like 3ds studio max), anything that utilizes that multi core threading? I think i got it, was just trying to get the difference between the tech on paper and its real world difference, think you helped.

As far as L3 cache is concerned, if I was viewing a 2gb high res photo, 2gb (or just over) of ram would be fine, but if I wanted to edit and play around with a large file the bigger the cache the faster this is!?
 
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As far as L3 cache is concerned, if I was viewing a 2gb high res photo, 2gb (or just over) of ram would be fine, but if I wanted to edit and play around with a large file the bigger the cache the faster this is!?

No 2GB of RAM would not be enough to have a 2GB image in memory. The OS is going to take anywhere between 250 and 750MB on it's own.

The L3 cache is measured in MBs not GBs, the larger L3 cache would not make any noticeable difference here IMO. Faster RAM might.
 
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