Intel gives six-core Gulftown an airing

Gamers' six-pack

Intel is showing off its latest Extreme Edition chip, a 32nm a six-core beast it's named the Intel Core i7-980X Extreme Edition processor.

Previously, codenamed Gulftown, the chip is getting an airing at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

Intel is particularly proud of the fact it can run 12 computing threads on the six cores.

A bundle of reviews have sprouted up on the Web. A good place to start to wade through them is here.

The chip has a fair bit of bang but at a cost or around a thousand Euros you have to be seriously loaded or daft as a brush to pick one up with your pocket money.

Intel also introduced a third version of its GPA (graphics performance analyzer), which claims to help game developers assess and optimise game performance on Intel platforms. The update supports multicore optimisations and includes support for DirectX 10.1 and 64-bit game executables.

GPA v3.0.is available for download the new  here.