Intel Gulftown/Core i9

[r.e.]

I'm trying to decide whether to buy i7 now or wait for i9. A few days ago, Tom's Hardware referenced an article written by some people who apparently got their hands on an i9 CPU, an article that has now been removed at Intel's request or demand:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/gulfto...ews-32315.html
http://pclab.pl/art39718.html

Does anyone know when in 2010 i9 is supposed to be released? First quarter works for me, second quarter not so well. This is for a custom desktop build, so the timing for Dell et al. doesn't matter.

Thanks.

[Ed Richards]

The small bit I have read is that the older chip is a good buy, unless you need some special quality of the new one. I am not sure what that would be in the still photo processing world. Photoshop is not that well optimized for multiple cores, and data movement is probably a bigger deal for ultimate speed than is pure FLOPS. I am not even sure that I7 really offers much over the previous generation of chips.

[r.e.]

Thanks,

I've seen suggestions that CS5 will make more use of this technology and I also want to use this computer for video editing.

Part of what's driving my decisionp-making here is that Intel's new chips will involve new technology. I'm still trying to figure out the implications of that for motherboard compatibility, etc.

[Jack Dahlgren]

If I were you I'd wait for the i11. It will surely be faster and more capable. It would also work better with the UHD video from large format sensors.

In all seriousness, the performance gains from generation to generation are on the range of 20% or so. Not a huge deal. You are going to get more bang for your buck by going to an SSD rather than increasing CPU speed. First generation technologies take a stepping or two to shake out, so if you need something now, buy now. Whatever you buy will be surpassed shortly after you buy it anyway.

[Doug Fisher]

Here are a couple of the latest notes from Engadget:

---

Early Core i9 benchmarks promising, make you wonder why you even bothered with Core i7

By Paul Miller posted Nov 24th 2009 1:24AM
Immediate obsolescence is an age old problem in the computer industry, but it doesn't look like the upcoming Core i9 "Gulftown" processor is going to do anything to solve it. Word is from early benchmarks of the upcoming Intel processor is that it bests the current Core i7 at the top of the heap with speed gains as large as 50% -- directly in line with its addition of two cores on top of the Core i7's existing four. Of course, six 2.8GHz cores aren't quite as exponentially helpful when applied to non-optimized tasks, but with most major modern software development aimed at better utilizing multiple cores, the core overkill of Core i9 will likely prove increasingly useful over time. At the start, however, Core i9's improvements will come at a premium: 130W power consumption instead of 95W in Core i7, and of course a high-end only price tag to match. Word is we'll be seeing these chips hit the market in early 2010, possibly as soon as January.

----

Just when you thought you had enough gigahertz in your life, along come the folks at Impress to blow the doors off Intel's upcoming crop of desktop processors. In the highly detailed charts there's wild talk of a low-powered "S" version of Core i5 that lowers the chip from 95W to 82W, a new Core i3 line that strips out the Turbo Boost technology and dips into budget-priced territory, and word that at the time of this roadmap at least the Core i9 "Gulftown" chip isn't slated for until Q2 of next year. We could probably bore you all day with the details, so hit up the source link for all the sordid details before we get ourselves too worked up.

http://translate.google.com/translat...ml&sl=ja&tl=en

[r.e.]

Thanks for the Engadget link. I'll have to start following them.

John, I was prepared to buy a solid state drive until a marketing guy from a highly reputable company that makes them told me, over the course of dinner, to take a pass for the time being.

[PenGun]

You need an X58 chipset. The P55 stuff will not do westmere or the new gulftown 32 nm 6 core shrink.

The 1366 LGA socket is what you need for this. Don't cheap out on lynfield if you want this upgrade path. Bloomfield is what you need.

[Marko]

If I were you I'd wait for the i11. It will surely be faster and more capable. It would also work better with the UHD video from large format sensors.

Pfft, i11 will be obsolete the moment it comes out, the i13 will blow it straight out of the water. And it will be much better suited for CS7 too.

[John Whitley]

The i9 really just provides more cores, and some minor incremental improvements in other areas. For that, you can just build out an 8-core system now and be done with it. That nonsense about a 50% performance boost is a bit daft, since one could just as well utter "nearly a 100% performance boost for a dual i7 system over a single i7 system". Depending on Intel's pricing, dual i7 may well be *cheaper* than an i9.

Also, for your main apps (CS4/5, and video processing, it sounds like) make sure that they're CPU-bound (i.e. the CPUs are the limiting factor for performance, instead of RAM, or disk speed) and are even capable of using more than four cores. You may get more total performance simply by adding more RAM than you'd planned on, or as another poster said, by adding fast disk (SSD, dedicated scratch disks, etc.) to the system.

If your goal is really to achieve top performance with CS5, then I'd wait until CS5 is released to identify the hardware spec that will maximize performance within your budget. That may not work for you so well, since CS5 isn't due until second quarter 2010. The biggest reason is that Adobe is optimizing for both multi-core CPU use as well as for leveraging GPU resources. Determining the best balance for $$ spent requires a working crystal ball right now.

[Mike1234]

I'm seeing some darned good advice here.