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Intel Core i7-980X Extreme Edition Gulftown 3.33GHz 12MB L3 Cache LGA 1366 130W Six-Core Desktop Processor - Retail
This item can only be purchased with combo(limit 1 per customer) what's this?


a mere $1,099.99 at newegg.

thats a better deal than some intel chips.... only $183 per core ... heh heh

Intel's top end has always been stupid expensive. It's one of those things where you just buy an entire computer to absorb the cost.

I was very very tempted to get one. I almost bought one. I was planning to buy one. I then talked myself down and bought a i7 930 instead. I'm playing around with it now to get it stable at 4.2Ghz with HT on. I just couldn't justify the cost benefit ratio. Either way I figure I have a 930 to beat on for now and by the time I get a 6 core most likely the price of it and the 930 combined will be at or below what I would have paid for the 6 core right now.

I'm thinking you made the right decision. Honestly, there are not too many apps yet that make use of even 4 cores (better yet 2). Five years from now, that may be a completely different case. However, right now, 4 is plenty... especially with hyperthreading.

The real problem is that current OSes really aren't designed for multicore. Win7 makes better use of multicore than XP or Vista but it's still very inefficient. Coincidentally I read this article yesterday:

Multicore requires OS rework, Windows architect advises
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/0 ... ndows.html

Good article. Sadly, if they were to develop along those lines, it'll be quite a while. I'm thinking 3-5 years at best. Probably have to ditch a bunch of hardware as well.

building two servers at work soon with dual 6-core Xeon X5650 cpus...love it!

Wish my work would do that. We've got a friggen 3ghz P4 running our server. That's after I told them that I could get a dual processor rig for half the price. Oh well.

hehe...yeah, we're not short on keeping things current here, which makes it fun. these are not our most powerful servers (we have about 200 between production/dev/test...60% virtual or so), but definitely "generous" for what they'll be doing.