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

Real-world tests – video encoding, rendering

Another benchmark was to render a test scene using Cinebench R10.

In single-threaded mode, all Nehalem-based processors obtain similar results. In multithreaded mode, the 32-nanometer six-core has about 33% more performance than the eight-thread Core i7. Why not 50%? The Cinema 4D engine takes a long time to complete a thread and start a new one, which means that for part of the time, not all 12 threads are being used. As the number of threads grew, scaling would keep deteriorating.

We checked how the six-core can handle ray-tracing under POV-Ray.

There are no surprises – ray-tracing is one of the applications very susceptible to parallelization of calculations. Scaling and thread number are close to ideal, at approximately 46%.

We also examined the speed of video conversion from MPEG-2 to x264.

In the first run, the workload is not distributed evenly among a large number of threads, but still, Gulftown gets a 20-percent advantage over Core i7. In the second run, in which tasks are assigned to threads more efficiently, once again, half more cores gives Gulftown a result better by half.