SANTA CLARA, Calif., Nov. 14, 2011 – Intel Corporation today advanced its highest-end six-core processor family with the introduction of two new processors: the Intel® Core™ i7-3960X processor Extreme Edition and the Intel Core i7-3930K processor.These second-generation i7 processors boast 12-threads and over 2 billion transistors having a calculated equivelent of 365,000 Intel 4004 processors. As developers’ and the gaming industries compute-intensive real-time processing grows, Intel responds with additional cores, larger CPU caches and new quad-channel memory support.

“To render our uniquely textured worlds, RAGE uses a very compute-intensive real-time process to transcode texture data from highly compressed form on disk to a compression format the GPU can use directly for rendering,” said John Carmack, technical director, id Software. “With two more available cores, a six-core system can transcode over 50 percent more texture data per second during gameplay than a four-core system, bringing new surfaces to full resolution quicker.”

These processors not only support the new Intel Advanced Vector Extension (AVX) instructions which benefit 3-D rendering and physics, they are fully unlocked making them very appealing to overclockers and enthusiasts who want to tinker with clock settings using simplifies utilities to do so. These heavy-duty processors come at a cost of $990 for the 3960X and $555 for the 3930X.

Intel Core i7-3960X / Intel Core i7-3930K Specifications (Respectively):

• 32nm
• Base speed of 3.3GHz / 3.2GHz
• 15MB L3 Cache / 12MB L3 Cache
• LGA 2011 socket platform

Source: Intel