You won't have to wait long for this one. Intel's Westmere CPUs may be hanging around with the dregs of processor society at the moment, chucking their chips in with the integrated graphics crowd, but they're about to grow up – and fast.
Sometime over the next few months Intel will go two better than the current line up of quad-core CPUs by launching a six-core version of its high-end Core i7 line. Based on the existing Nehalem architecture, the headline feature is a process shrink down to 32nm, while the rest of the spec sheet remains largely the same. It could be a genuine upgrade.
Games programmers are getting much better at working with multithreaded code so that most major titles, like Empire: Total War and its forthcoming sequel Napoleon, will see a much bigger performance increase when given extra cores to play around in than the often sporadic leaps in frame rate we saw going from two to four cores.
Because the benefits will be in the amount of cores, rather than the speed of things you can do at once, Intel are encouraging some developers to add extra content specifically for people with a six-core CPU. Given the plethora of disappointments we've had lately with almost every technology that's promised to increase our frame rates, we'll reserve judgement until we have one in the office.
The good news is that these hexa-powered processors will fit into most existing X58 motherboards after a simple BIOS flash. The bad news is X58 motherboards are still very expensive too.
