Intel Core i9 (Gulftown) - 6 cores, 32 nm: hands-on review 

Synthetic tests – Sandra

We started with synthetic tests in Sandra 2009:

In arithmetic and multimedia performance benchmarks, the results increase almost linearly with the number of threads. Gulftown is about 50% faster than Core i7.

What is important for wPrime is above all pure computing performance, and again – Gulftown ahead of Intel Core i7 by half.

In addition, scaling in the new version of the OMP Test, also featured in previous reviews, is almost perfect. The number of threads has a direct bearing on the results.

Then we checked the memory subsystem performance. Remember that the third-level cache and the memory controller on Gulftown operated at lower clock speeds than on Core i7 and Core i5.

It is evident at first glance that there is something wrong with the results. Apparently, even the latest version of Everest is still unable to measure the bandwidth and memory-access latency correctly. To make sure that the memory subsystem is working properly, we measured the time to count 16 million digits of pi using Super PI software:

Super PI is not exactly designed for comparing processors with different architectures, but it is very sensitive to any irregularities in memory access. Despite the greater L3 cache capacity, Gulftown’s score is poorer than that of Core i7. The difference is greater than that implied by the difference in uncore timing – it is caused by early BIOS versions that run 32-nanometer six-cores. The same memory slowdown effect occurred on all three LGA 1366 motherboards tested. It is expected that as we are closer to the release and commercial availability of the Gulftowns, the BIOSes will be refined and memory access will be a tad better.