In a formal announcement on Thursday, chip giant Intel unveiled its latest flagship processor for the PC market – the Core i7 980x Extreme, the inimitable 6-core chip which has been code-named ‘Gulftown.’

Boasting six physical cores, as well as hyperthreading technology, the new ‘Gulftown’ processor – which is called “Westmere-EP” in the server version, and has been manufactured on Intels’s 32nm process - is almost like having twelve computers in one!

Featuring a 1.17-billion transistor chip with 12 megabytes of Level 3 cache, the ‘Gulftown’ chip supports up to 12 simultaneously threads; and easily beats the ‘current’ fastest PC processor, Core i7, both in terms of faster clock speeds and bigger internal cache.

Initially, only some of the niche businesses – particularly those focused on photo processing, video editing, or 3D modeling - will apparently see immediate benefit of the ‘Gulftown’ processor, with the additional processing threads giving a performance boost for tasks involving Adobe Photoshop, Blender, and the like.

Otherwise, for most of the users, the processor is hardly a holdup – especially if their systems already have dual or quad-core processors. In fact, technically speaking, Intel’s earlier quad-core flagship chip for PCs - Core i7 975 Extreme – is almost at par with the new Core i7 980x Extreme in terms of 3.3GHz core frequency, 3.6GHz turbo boost frequency, 130-watt TDP, and triple-channel DDR3 memory controller!