In case you hadn't noticed, Intel has been dominating the CPU scene ever since the Core 2 architecture popped out. The company followed up with the Core i7 (and more recently the Core i5/i3) and managed to outdo itself by quite a bit. In a bid to continue that trend, Intel is unveiling the Core i7-980x Extreme Edition, a 6-core, 12-thread behemoth.

　　Like other Extreme Edition processors before it, the Core i7-980x will be priced at lofty $1,000 levels. It's pricey, but we tend to think of them as what you can expect to get at more palatable price points down the road.

　　New heatsink! Intel will manufacture the Core i7-980x on a 32nm process, whereas previous Core i7 processors were manufactured on a 45nn process. The smaller manufacturing process enabled Intel to slap even more goodies into the processor. In this case, the Core i7-980x got six cores and 12MB of L3 cache. Previous Core i7 processors had four cores and 8MB of L3 cache.

　　The Core i7-980x is similar to previous Core i7 processors and comes with hyper-threading, the Quick Path Interconnect (QPI), and an integrated memory controller. Other features of note include SSE4.2 instructions, better branch prediction, improved loop streaming, additional caching hierarchy, faster virtualization, deep buffers, improved lock support, and new AES-NI acceleration.

　　In a less-than-common turn of events, the new processor is compatible with existing Intel X58 Express chipsets and works with the existing LGA 1366 socket.

　　Intel redesigned its standard heatsink and came up with a larger cooler that's considerably taller and has heatpipes to help distribute heat. In use, the cooler has two modes: performance and quiet. The fan hardly makes a peep when in quiet mode.

　　A few years back, multicore processors were limited by applications. Software simply wasn't ready to take advantage of the hardware. The situation has changed considerably. Numerous video encoders, 3D rendering apps, and even compression programs are well prepared to use the extra cores that the Core i7-980x has. Performance speedups in these situations are guaranteed, and the Core i7-980x is worth every penny if time is of the essence.

　　Performance graphs. On the gaming side of the equation, the engines haven't quite caught up. Synthetic benchmarks like 3DMark Vantage demonstrate where we're going to be, and the Core i7-980x will likely kick some major butt when we get there. Switching over to real games, like World in Conflict, Crysis Warhead, and Lost Planet, we see gains when we limit testing to situations where we're not GPU bound. But when it comes down to settings you'd actually play at, we're most definitely limited by the video card. If gaming is your primary concern, you'll want to hold off on this hefty purchase until the majority of games get highly parallelized.