Zardon

French website macbidouille.com has gone live with the suggestion that the new Intel processor could make its first appearance in a section of a new refreshed Mac Pro range from Apple. Apple should launch the new Mac Pro at the beginning of 2010 and the system will also ship with 8/16GB of ram and 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports. Maximum memory count is said to be around 128GB.

Going on a past track record this could very well be true as Apple were the first to launch with Nehalem dual CPU's - long before websites even had their samples for review. We would expect them to launch with a dual socket Gulftown board offering 24 cores to their high end customer base - which is well known to be a strong designer fanbase.

Gulftown is a very promising new desktop part which offers 12 cores, six real and six virtual per processor. Using a smaller fabrication process the processors are able to maintain a 130W TDP and apparently feature 12MB of L3 cache. There is also tri channel memory support, and a Quickpath interconnect as well as being able to slot into existing X58 motherboards equipped with 1366 sockets. Whether this launches as Core i9 is just a rumour at this point - but highly possible.

Allan Campbell: Heaven Media

Judas

kickass

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dj_stick

12 cores, hyperthreading....

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