[grogi]

Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 Quad Core CPU
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Launched on the 12th November 2007 and built on a state-of-the-art 45nm manufacture process, the Intel Yorkfield series is largely a die shrink of Intel's enormously successful 65nm Core 2 processors. With a die size of just 214mm² and 820 million transistors, Intel has performed some significant shrinking in comparison to its 286mm² / 582 million transistor predecessor, the Kentsfield

Of course, just a die shrink was never going to be enough to raise the punters eyebrows. So Intel have also given the chip a 25% increase in cache, taking it up to a rather insane 12mb (6mb per die).

Also bundled on the chip are a total of 47 new SSE4 instructions designed to increase multimedia, floating point and general number crunching performance. This is further backed up by Intel's new "Super Shuffle" engine, which Intel claim to improve the performance of both SSE2, SSE3 and SSE4 instructions that have "shuffle-like operations such as pack, unpack and wider packed shifts" resulting in further increases in performance for content creation, imaging, video and other high-performance computing."