Monolithic monster examined
And there you have it. A six-core chip that can process 12 concurrent threads by way of hyperthreading. The general setup is pretty similar to four-core Nehalem's. The diagram may appear to point to the contrary, but each core has access to the full complement of 12MB of L3 cache. As on the previous generation, the uncore portion still dictates the speed of the memory-controller and L3 cache.
Core i7 980X EE will ship with a base multiplier of 25x and native clock-speed of 3.33GHz, rising to 3.46GHz with multi-core Turbo Boost and up to 3.60GHz when handling a single-threaded application.
The chip is multiplier-unlocked, as per previous EEs, and enthusiasts may take advantage of the more-fine-grained control over frequencies to hit a desired speed.
Idling down to 1.6GHz when not doing much.
More cache than ever before.
A BIOS update is required for it to work on a range of ASUS X58 boards.
It's just fun to turn on Task Manager and see 12 threads being processed.
