Back in the Pentium days, Intel was boasting about hitting the 10GHz ceiling, but that crazily fond dream was killed by the NetBurst. Now that they have the Gulftown and better steppings, smaller process, Intel’s half way there breaking the party. What’re we talking about? We’re referring to the upcoming Core i7 990X that’s hitting shelves in few weeks! Gosh, yet another extreme processor from Intel that’s gonna hit the retail $999 price, or more.

The processor is set to debut in just a few weeks, during September 2010. The i7-990X is based on a new stepping of Intel’s 32nm Gulftown core comprised of six cores and additional six threads thanks to HyperThreading (HT). The clock is upped from 3.33GHz to 3.46GHz, while the Turbo mode ticking at 3.6GHz. According to preliminary results, you should have no snags in getting this processor running past 4.5GHz on air, and 5GHz on water should be granted with some additional juices. Intel, you’re nearly there man, hang in there!

According to *BSN’s source, engineers are elated with the new stepping, as the firm is about to roll out new Xeon processors with similar high clock-speeds. Given that in some cases, the overclocked Gulftown beats AMD’s 24-core Opteron 6100 [Magny-Cours] setup. Bear in mind that this will not be the first Gulftown clocked at 3.46GHz. At the beginning of 2010, Intel released a quad-core version [two cores disabled] named Xeon X5677, which featured 12MB of L3 cache, just like the fully-fledged Hexa-core versions. The clocks varied from 1.86 to 3.46GHz, as Gulftown became the first Intel core to ship at 3.46GHz following the ill-fated Prescott architecture and the long-forgotten Pentium 4 EE 955.

The Core i7 990X versus Pentium 4 EE 955 is also a good evidence of how technology progressed – in only five years, the $1000 mark went from buying you a 150 Watt eating, polar cap melting single core with operating temperatures of 90C+ with a then most expensive, $60 cooler – to a Hexa-core that won’t consume more than 130W and yet, offering more three times the cores and much higher performance.

[via BSN]