Intel Core i7-980X Gulftown Six-Core 32nm Processor Review

Clock-per-clock: Bloomfield vs. Gulftown

Now as we have already established, at first glance Gulftown is basically just a six-core Bloomfield with an extra 4MB of L3 cache and manufactured on a 32nm process. However, what we are interested in finding out is whether there are any hidden changes that improve overall performance, maybe Uncore tweaks or lower cache latencies, etc. In order to determine this, we came up with a duel: Core i7 Bloomfield vs. Core i7 Gulftown. To ensure that both chips were competing on an equal playing field, we set identical frequencies and timings for both processors, and we also disabled Gulftown's 2 extra cores.


Now as you can see, despite losing two of its cores the Gulftown's extra 4MB of L3 cache remains (one of the advantages of having a shared cache pool), but that shouldn't skew the results too much. It should be mentioned that Gulftown's large L3 cache has a 14% higher latency than Bloomfield's, which will obviously have a slight effect on clock-per-clock performance in some workloads.


In our admittedly very small selection of applications, we didn't notice any worthwhile performance differences between Bloomfield and Gulftown. That wasn't unexpected though since Intel never claimed otherwise. We can however say that in certain games there is likely to be improvements in the minimum framerate due to Gulftown's extra cache. Also, thanks to Gulftown's Advanced Encrytion Standard New Instructions (AES-NI), you might see as much as a 100% improvement in AES encryption and decryption with certain applications. Overall though, short of the AES-NI instructions, there is no significant performance difference between Bloomfield and Gulftown from a clock-per-clock standpoint in most applications.