In a formal announcement on Thursday, Intel revealed its Core i7-980X Extreme processor, which is equipped with 6 cores and has been made under 32nm process of the company. Intel said that i7-980X , code-named "Gulftown" in desktop version is better than the present i7 975X as the it has six physical cores while the later has four cores and this new process includes 12Mb cache while the present one has 8Mb cache.

Intel last month revealed information about 6-core chip at the ISSCC show. This chip is a 1.17-billion transistor chip supported by 12 megabytes of Level 3 cache and is termed as "Westmere-EP" in the server version. It has a capability of managing 12 threads side by side.

Equipped with all these additional features, i7-980X appears easily outshining the earlier one as almost the fastest desktop processor.

It is now becoming evident that even though AMD and Intel have different lines of focus with AMD emphasizing on cost and power consumption, while Intel aiming it on multi-threading ground, the latter is leading the race of launching better core processers.

Core i7 Extreme 980X will cost $1,000, same as 975X. Chip therefore promises a high-performance and can compute-intensive applications. It is also known that AMD also plans to launch its 6-core chip with code name “Thuban" which has recently been confirmed to be termed as “Phenom” II X6.