Today begins a new dawn in the processor marketplace, with the world’s first ever consumer available hexa (6) – core CPU  being officially unveiled; the Core i7-980X Gulftown.

The Intel Core i7 980X represents the next step forward in technology, taking the crown away from dual and quad cores as the premiere line and launching into a new realm where multi-threaded power is the true focus. While the actual release date is still some time away, all information that has been not-so-silently bottled up over the recent months can now come to light

Gulftown is currently, the only high-performance processor based on Westmere technology; a 32nm migration of Nehalem architecture. It boasts six-cores operating at 3.33GHz, each with 64 KB L1 & 256 KB L2 caches and a shared 12MB L3 cache. Integrated technologies include; Hyper-Threading, allowing for 12 threads, Turbo Boost offering speeds up to 3.6GHz,  and integrated memory controller that supports DDR3-1066. The processor works on the LGA-1366 platform along with the x58 chipset that has existing support on most motherboards through a BIOS update.

Obviously we encourage you to read our full review available here but if your just looking for the Cliffs Note version here you go… it kicks ass. In nearly every benchmark run – synthetic or real-world – Gulftown shows that it is the number one processor available on the market. In applications that can take advatange of multiple cores, the unit excels – and then some.

The price for so much power? Its MSRP is set at $999 USD and should be available in late March, early April. Sure it’s not cheap, but bleeding edge never is.

Check out the full Hardware Canuck’s Review: http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/29632-intel-core-i7-980x-gulftown-six-core-32nm-processor-review.html