Intel's 3.33GHz Core i7 975 Extreme Edition

Intel's 3.33GHz Core i7 975 Extreme Edition

Intel appears to be set to give it another nudge forward with the launch of the Core i7 975 Extreme Edition processor.

Details are in short supply, but overclockers Mikeguava and Fugger appear to have their hands on Intel's range-topping part and have done what they do best - overclock the hell out of it. Using GIGABYTE's EX58 Extreme mainboard, Corsair's peltier-cooled memory and a pair of Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics cards, they managed to score a staggering 47,026 3DMarks.

What's interesting is that the CPU features D0 stepping, and such a change usually denotes a refined silicon package that could result in lower power consumption and should provide greater overclocking headroom.

There's no news on release details at this early stage, but this is a chip that's likely to be priced close to the mind-boggling £1,000 mark. We'd hate to be one of those who've recently splashed out over £800 on the soon-to-be-dethroned Core i7 965 Extreme Edition.

Intel® Core™ i7-975 processor Extreme Edition

The highest performing desktop processor on the planet. Shatter the limits of desktop computing with the intelligent performance of the Intel® Core™ i7-975 processor Extreme Edition, the smartest way to blast through highly-threaded games and applications.

Intel® Core™ i7 processor Extreme Edition

Conquer the world of extreme gaming with the fastest processor on the planet: the Intel® Core™ i7 processor Extreme Edition. With faster, intelligent multi-core technology that responds to your workload, it delivers an incredible breakthrough in gaming performance.

Features and benefits:
Get extreme with your gaming and advanced multimedia.
Intel Core i7 processors deliver an incredible breakthrough in quad-core performance and feature the latest innovations in processor technologies:

• Intel® Turbo Boost technology maximizes speed for demanding applications, dynamically accelerating performance to match your workload-more performance when you need it the most.
• Intel® Hyper-Threading technology enables highly threaded applications to get more work done in parallel. With 8 threads available to the operating system, multi-tasking becomes even easier.
• Intel® Smart Cache provides a higher-performance, more efficient cache subsystem. Optimized for industry leading multi-threaded games.
• Intel® QuickPath Interconnect is designed for increased bandwidth and low latency. It can achieve data transfer speeds as high as 25.6 GB/sec with the Extreme Edition processor.
• Integrated memory controller enables three channels of DDR3 1066 MHz memory, resulting in up to 25.6 GB/sec memory bandwidth. This memory controller's lower latency and higher memory bandwidth delivers amazing performance for data-intensive applications.
• Intel® HD Boost significantly improves a broad range of multimedia and compute-intensive applications. The 128-bit SSE instructions are issued at a throughput rate of one per clock cycle, allowing a new level of processing efficiency with SSE4 optimized applications.