Intel Core i7-980X Gulftown Hexa-core Processor Review

Experimental Tests

Euler 3D Fluid Dynamics

---

This fluid dynamics simulation is very CPU and memory intensive.  From the benchmark source website:

The benchmark testcase is the AGARD 445.6 aeroelastic test wing. The wing uses a NACA 65A004 airfoil section and has a panel aspect ratio of 1.65, a taper ratio of 0.66, and a 45 degree quarter-chord sweep angle. This AGARD wing was tested at the NASA Langley Research Center in the 16-foot Transonic Dynamics Tunnel and is a standard aeroelastic test case used for validation of unsteady, compressible CFD codes. Figure 1 shows the CFD predicted Mach contours for a freestream Mach number of 0.960.

The benchmark CFD grid contains 1.23 million tetrahedral elements and 223 thousand nodes. The benchmark executable advances the Mach 0.50 AGARD flow solution. Our benchmark score is reported as a CFD cycle frequency in Hertz.

Microsoft Image Composite Engine

---

This application takes any number of images and attempts to “stitch” them together to make a single panoramic image.



Our MS ICE results continue to perturb us but it is clear that the though the differences between the Core i7-980X and the other Bloomfield parts isn’t as noticeable as this graph makes it out to be, it is faster than anything else we have tested.

Hyper PI (Super PI)

---

From Wikipedia: Super PI is a computer program that calculates pi to a specified number of digits after the decimal point – up to a maximum of 32 million. It uses Gauss-Legendre algorithm and is a Windows port of the program used by Yasumasa Kanada in 1995 to compute Pi to 232 digits.



The Core i7-980X makes a good showing here but doesn’t throw anything at us that blows us away.