Intel Core i7 970 Gulftown On Linux

The Minion developers describe this open-source program as being a "lean, efficient solver for constraint satisfaction problems." It though is not able to take advantage of all twelve threads on the Core i7 970 as efficient as some of the other native Linux programs, which leads it to only performing a tiny bit better than the Core i7 870 that can clock higher in its turbo mode.

NASA's NPB (NAS Parallel Benchmarks) provides some of the best results for highlighting the Core i7 970 and its 6 cores with Hyper Threading. Using the Fortran OpenMP version, the EP.B test from NPB with the Core i7 970 is 62% faster than the i7-870, 73% faster than the i7-920, and is three times faster than the Core i5 750.

The NPB IS.C test is not quite as multi-thread happy as EP.B, but here there is still quite the advantage to using the Core i7 970 over other CPUs with less threads.

As the last NASA NPB test in this article, UA.A also shows very promising results for the Core i7 970 if you are looking to take advantage of its thread count.