Intel silently made its newest addition to the Core i7 desktop processor family official: the Core i7 960.
This socket LGA-1366 processor is designed to work on motherboards with the Intel X58 Express chipset. After Intel's gradual replacement of the Core i7 965 Extreme Edition with the Core i7 975 Extreme Edition, there remained a scope for a non-XE Core i7 model with the same clock-speed as the i7 965 XE, albeit with an upwards locked bus frequency multiplier.
The Core i7 960 comes clocked at 3.20 GHz (24.0 x 133 MHz), with a maximum Turbo Boost speed of 3.43 GHz. It has four processing cores, and with the HyperThreading Technology, provides the operating system with eight logical CPUs. It comes with a QuickPath Interconnect speed of 4.8 GT/s, and supports up to 24 GB of memory with its triple-channel (192-bit wide) DDR3 memory interface. Each processing core has a dedicated L2 cache of 256 KB, while an 8 MB L3 cache is shared between all four cores. It is built on the 45 nm HKMG process, with a TDP of 130W.
The Core i7 960 is touted to displace the Core i7 950 from its existing price-point of around US $562 (in 1000 unit tray quantities). As evidence of that, popular American retailer Newegg.com has listed the OEM part (chip-only) at $589.99, a mere $10 higher than the retail box of the Core i7 950 listed on the same store.
