Intel’s latest chip, the Core i9, shouldn’t be out for at least a few more months, but one copy of it somehow managed to get put up for sale on eBay – and sold for $1,200. While this may initially sound like bad news to you if you thought you would’ve bought it, don’t be so quick to envy the buyer – the chip’s pictures clearly showed its serial number, so the merchant should be tracked down pretty quickly by Intel – and with him, most probably the buyer as well.
The Core i9 builds on the i7’s design by adding an extra couple of cores and a 32nm fabrication process. The total number of cores amounts to 6, which allows for 12 processing threads. The processor was benchmarked earlier, and the results were mixed – on one hand, there wasn’t much of a boost in performance when it came to games, Windows start-up time, and other things which weren’t naturally optimized for multi-threading.
But when you start rendering video or 3D scenes, the full power of the i9 is unleashed, as such applications are normally built with threading in mind from the ground up – and to give specifics, the i9 gave a 50% boost in performance as opposed to the i7 in encoding MPEG-2 video to x264.
[ Via Gizmodo ]
Got something to say? Leave your comments!