Intel Core i7 970 Gulftown On Linux

The results from GraphicsMagick are not as favorable to the Core i7 970 as some of the other tests, as not all of the cores are being fully utilized, but the numbers are still good.

Himeno is a poisson pressure solver program and when running it across all of these multi-core CPUs, the lead was still with the Core i7 970 but it faced greater competition from the less-expensive CPUs.

For those unfamiliar with Bullet, it is an open-source physics engine capable of handling collision detection, soft-body dynamics, and rigid dynamics, among other capabilities. Bullet is used within a variety of commercial games (such as the Grand Theft Auto IV title) and by open-source projects like Blender, OpenSceneGraph, Crystal Space, and OGRE. The Bullet developers are currently working on OpenCL support and a variety of other optimizations, but with Bullet 2.75 there really isn't much of a benefit to the Core i7 970 with its twelve threads over the Core i7 870, which has only eight threads, but it's turbo frequency tops out at 3.6GHz. The performance between the Core i7 870 and Core i7 970 was effectively the same and the other Intel Core i5 and i7 parts were right behind.

With C-Ray, an open-source ray-tracing benchmark, the Core i7 970 went back to pulling in a stronger first-place finish, but the dual Opteron 2384 setup proved to provide a good amount of competition.