The Core i7 980X Review: Intel's First 6-Core Desktop CPU
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 11, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
3dsmax 9 - SPECapc 3dsmax CPU Rendering Test
Today's desktop processors are more than fast enough to do professional level 3D rendering at home. To look at performance under 3dsmax we ran the SPECapc 3dsmax 8 benchmark (only the CPU rendering tests) under 3dsmax 9 SP1. The results reported are the rendering composite scores:
Our 3dsmax test shows an improvement, but it also shows that we're not totally CPU core bound - the performance advantage over the 975 is only 11%.
Cinebench R10
Created by the Cinema 4D folks we have Cinebench, a popular 3D rendering benchmark that gives us both single and multi-threaded 3D rendering results.
Single threaded performance of the Core i7 980X is among the best Intel has to offer today, you no longer have to choose between more cores or more frequency thanks to turbo.
Spawn enough threads and the Core i7 980X can't be touched. Performance here is 32.5% better than the Core i7 975, which itself is significantly faster than anything else on the chart.
POV-Ray 3.73 beta 23 Ray Tracing Performance
POV-Ray is a popular, open-source raytracing application that also doubles as a great tool to measure CPU floating point performance.
I ran the SMP benchmark in beta 23 of POV-Ray 3.73. The numbers reported are the final score in pixels per second.
Oh that? That's just a 47% peformance boost over the Core i7 975. This is nearly perfect scaling with core count, showing us that we're not limited by memory bandwidth or anything else. The 980X is a beast.
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Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, March 11, 2010 - link
That depends on the board I believe. Intel's DX58SO may not post without the BIOS update.Take care,
Anand
Jammrock - Thursday, March 11, 2010 - link
One small title error. Intel's Xeon X7000-series CPUs are the first hex-core processors from Intel. Those are server only, but they are out there.http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=36947&cod...">http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=36...16M+Cach...
Gulftown is the first desktop hex-core though.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, March 11, 2010 - link
Corrected :)Take care,
Anand
artifex - Thursday, March 11, 2010 - link
3x cores and threads for less than 2x the TDP of their dual cores? sexy!Isaac the k - Thursday, March 11, 2010 - link
I must say, I do find this rather exciting.But since I'm running a poorly threaded data-simulation app with extremely high throughput, I'm debating whether the extra latency vs. the larger shared cache could potentially harm performance.
If it wouldn't, I might actually request one for what my office is doing right now...
mikeblas - Thursday, March 11, 2010 - link
Aren't the Xeon E7450, Xeon L7455, and Xeon X7460 all six-core Intel processors that were released before this processor?semo - Thursday, March 11, 2010 - link
If I understand this right Nahalem is the name of the micro architecture and not any CPU in particular. On page 2, the first die shot is captioned Nehalem. Shouldn't it be Bloomfield?BTW Anand, you are doing a good job demystifying desktop products but the mobile space is even worse
arandale http://ark.intel.com/ProductCollection.aspx?codeNa...">http://ark.intel.com/ProductCollection.aspx?codeNa... vs clarkdale http://ark.intel.com/ProductCollection.aspx?codeNa...">http://ark.intel.com/ProductCollection.aspx?codeNa...
vPro is even more confusing. E.g. AMT KVM is supposed to work on AMT 6.0 + on chip GPU yet the i3 don't apply... or the i5-661 http://communities.intel.com/community/openportit/...">http://communities.intel.com/community/...ote-cont...
it would be useful if we could get some articles on mobile chips and/or vPro
iwodo - Thursday, March 11, 2010 - link
Waiting for Sandy Bridge- which will hopefully be the true successor of Core 2 Duo.PCI - Express 3.0, SATA 3.0, USB 3.0 ( Light Peak will be even better ), Bluetooth 4.0.
AnnonymousCoward - Saturday, March 13, 2010 - link
Light Peak is kinda dumb...I think that's just multi-lane USB3/PCIe, and using light instead of wires is pointless since no one needs really long point-to-point cables. Apple just wants it since they're all about marketing new flashy things. USB3 could just as easily use as many lanes as you want, but it'd be unnecessarily expensive since 1 lane at 5Gbps is much faster than anything.Pessimism - Thursday, March 11, 2010 - link
This is not intel's first 6 core CPU. The 6 core Xeon 7400 was announced in 2008.