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Intel i9 chip

The Intel's six core is what i`m waiting on next year along with a pair of nVidia's GT300 series cards in SLI for my new build, to replace the one in my sig.
 
There is no way that Gulftown (i9) will overclock as well as Bloomfield (i7) as it will produce 50% more heat at any given clock.

Given that Bloomfield already offers 4 cores with 2 threads/clock, and the current cheapest model reliably clocks to 3.8GHz+, I don't really see who would benefit from this chip in a desktop machine (certainly for at least 2 years anyway, VMware or Xen servers yes, desktops no).

Sometime over the next year, I expect intel to refresh it's skulltrail platfrom and bring 2 socket i7 to the desktop, this IMO will be much better value for the enthusiast with too much money than i9, because for the price of an i9, you could have 2 i7920s running at 4GHz.
 
The E8400 is a star, I'd be happy to have one. I hope you've clocked it :)

I'd expect the hexcore/sexcore to be D0 stepping or the next version along anyway.

HazardO is probably right with regards to overclocking it. I'm hoping that it produces silly amounts of heat won't matter if you strap enough radiators to it. Looking forward to seeing the stock heatsink it comes with.

However I too am saving up for one of these. Multithreaded applications for the win
 
*sigh* DragonQ just pointed out gulftown was 32nm not 45nm, so 50% is wrong, but it will still produce more heat clock for clock IMO.
 
Apparently it's 130W TDP.

But it does look amazing, unfortunately AMD are holding out on us until Q4 2010 or early 2011. They already have a six core CPU on the market though, the Opteron, and it's only like £400, or less. Also the TDP is really low, like 65 or 95W. Server CPUs can be used in desktop PCs.. they're designed to be running all the time with a heavy load. Pretty useful for gaming then :p

What about AMD's Fusion? 22nm... still hazy on the details but 2012 is a reliable estimate.
 
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In the same way that a q9550 uses more power and runs hotter than a e8400 at the same clock, I don't understand your question. 6 processing cores is likely to use 1.5 times as much power as 4 processing cores.

The shrink to 32nm will probably involve lower voltages and lower currents, but comes with disadvantages like the silicon being more fragile, more vulnerable to damage by overvolting.

So good odds that it'll be hotter, but no it won't use 1.5 times as much power.
 
Think your wrong there - none of the quad cores CPUs I have run double or even 50% warmer than the equivalent dual cores.
 
I'm not saying they run twice as hot, I'm saying they use twice as much power and therefore release twice as much heat. That's not the same as the temperature doubling.

Firstly it's temperature above ambient that needs to be considered, not absolute temperature. Secondly the approximation that temperature varies linearly with rate of heat transfer isn't great. Finally this is approximate, as only the cores are doubled, the rest of the circuitry is the same. I'm assuming it's the cores that use the most power, which seems a fair guess.

The drop to 32nm means the increase in power consumption will be less than this implies though, as the above assumes constant efficiency.
 
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