GDC 2010: Intel announces Core i7- 980X Extreme Edition (six cores!)
Do you want to have your gaming PC with the fastest processor available, at least for the next few months? Intel has you covered today. The PC chip maker used the Game Developers Conference as an excuse to announce the new Core i7 - 980X Extreme Edition processor (previously known by its code name Gulftown). It's the first consumer PC processor to have six cores and 12 computing threads. Previously the top chips had "just" four processing cores.As one might expect, this chip is both very fast and also extremely expensive. Intel expects to sell this for a whopping $999 in a few weeks and you will be seeing them inside high-end gaming PCs from various makers soon. Granted not too many PC games take advantage of multiple cores yet but more and more are showing up including Napoleon: Total War and R.U.S.E.


