Intel ships 4.4 Ghz Westmere dual-cores.

[Boissez]

In the middle of last year, when Intel produced pre-production parts for the next refresh of Xeon 5600-series, they also made several quite interesting Xeon samples. The most distinguishing feature of these chips was very high clock frequency. Even the slowest Xeon microprocessor from that group was clocked at 4 GHz, and the fastest one reached 4.66 GHz. One of these samples made into production, and started shipping earlier this year. The processor was released as Xeon X5698, and, at 4.4 GHz, it's the fastest Intel production CPU ever.
Intel Xeon X5698 is built on Westemere microarchitecture, and, with a couple of notable differences, shares many features with other Xeon 5600 chips. One of the differences, extremely high core frequency, we already mentioned above. This model has only two active CPU cores, and we believe that 4 other cores on the die are disabled. The processor comes with 12 MB L3 cache, HyperThreading, and works in socket 1366 motherboards. Intel X5698 has OEM part number AT80614007314AA, and S-spec number SLC32. We suspect that this SKU will be shipped only in OEM systems.

Source
Most likely OEM-only but Intel has now broken the 4 Ghz barrier

[Postmodum]

Uhhhh... These can be great clockers!

[Mech0z]

Odd they break it on server chips, they normally run slower than consumer chips.

For me its oppesit of what it has been for many years, its low core count and high clock.

[Chrono Detector]

About time too, too bad these are server chips. I wonder how much are these though.

[Boissez]

Odd they break it on server chips, they normally run slower than consumer chips.

For me its oppesit of what it has been for many years, its low core count and high clock.

It's most likely made to run software where you pay your license by the core.

[[XC] Oj101]

That's incredibly fast, now we need 10c/20t/8p 4.66GHz Westmeres (I think that would be around 700GFlops of power in one machine )

[[XC] Synthetickiller]

Don't i3s OC to this and are really stable on air as well? Just wondering...

Seemed like this wasn't an impossible feet at all. They just pushed the chips a tad.

Looking forward to 5ghz quads that OC to 6+!

[saaya]

what happened to the 4.66 one?
wantttt!!! i havent been this excited about new cpus for a loooong time!
if it supports HT and the price is nice i might get one!
itll probably cost a lot though :/

[informal]

Very nice clock speed! For those who need fastest chips for their serial workloads,these are the ones to have.

[Halk]

Best chips for gaming! I've been looking at what's slowing down games after some upgrades, and it's always always single core processes :/

[Mungri]

Best chips for gaming! I've been looking at what's slowing down games after some upgrades, and it's always always single core processes :/

Arent increasingly more games making use of quad cores now though?

4.4 - 4.66 Ghz is impressive for stock clocks, but surely they can make a quad with those speeds by now :p

[Mech0z]

It's most likely made to run software where you pay your license by the core.

Right, forgot about that type of pricing scheme

[Postmodum]

Hihi imagine ... full TDP of the i7's just to use on 2 cores great

I will imagine 5.5Ghz o'clocks to be not that hard to reach

[Halk]

Arent increasingly more games making use of quad cores now though?

4.4 - 4.66 Ghz is impressive for stock clocks, but surely they can make a quad with those speeds by now :p

They do at times, but when it comes to delays while loading it seems it's often a single threaded process.

[-Sweeper_]

7 years after netburst they finally broke the 4ghz barrier on x86 CPUs

[Mafio]

holy moly, i want one - ok, more than one - of these beast

[DTU_XaVier]

7 years after netburst they finally broke the 4ghz barrier on x86 CPUs

Only a wee bit of way to go to the 10 GHz barrier then

[Skratch]

Ehh you can break 4.8ghz on 2600k with ease and most do well over 5ghz with 4 cores and hyperthreading for 325. Bucks

[DarthShader]

Only two cores of the six are active??

[saaya]

Arent increasingly more games making use of quad cores now though?

4.4 - 4.66 Ghz is impressive for stock clocks, but surely they can make a quad with those speeds by now :p

its more like games CAN use 2-4 cores now... doesnt mean it makes it a lot faster... i havent seen any game scale above 2 cores in a way that would make it justified to go for a quad if all you do is game... 5% extra performance, maybe 10%... hows that worth upgrading or paying more? either its playable already or it isnt and then extra cores dont help...

besides, more cores help average and max fps, i havent seen them improve min fps...
from single to dual you get a slight boost in min fps, but thats it...
if you care about min fps then 2 fast cores = lord

[Falkentyne]

If you disable 2 cores on a 2600k, you can run VERY low voltage at 4.4 ghz. Try it.

[BababooeyHTJ]

its more like games CAN use 2-4 cores now... doesnt mean it makes it a lot faster... i havent seen any game scale above 2 cores in a way that would make it justified to go for a quad if all you do is game... 5% extra performance, maybe 10%... hows that worth upgrading or paying more? either its playable already or it isnt and then extra cores dont help...

besides, more cores help average and max fps, i havent seen them improve min fps...
from single to dual you get a slight boost in min fps, but thats it...
if you care about min fps then 2 fast cores = lord

I've seen you claim a lot of stuff like that about gaming. Quads don't help, overclocking is unnecessary, etc. According to your posts you don't need anything more than an E5300 for an optimal gaming experience.

[Thraxis]

its more like games CAN use 2-4 cores now... doesnt mean it makes it a lot faster... i havent seen any game scale above 2 cores in a way that would make it justified to go for a quad if all you do is game... 5% extra performance, maybe 10%... hows that worth upgrading or paying more? either its playable already or it isnt and then extra cores dont help...

besides, more cores help average and max fps, i havent seen them improve min fps...
from single to dual you get a slight boost in min fps, but thats it...
if you care about min fps then 2 fast cores = lord

Valve's multi-core support on TF2/L4D/L4D2 made quite the difference for me. Before I'd have to run at 1080p with 0 aa when only using 1 core. Using all 4 I can throw the AA to 8x-16x and still get just as much performance than I did with one core. Should it's "only" aa, but it improves the experience, and ontop of that i still get higher min/avg/max frames.

Wish Blizzard would get on that kind of train, sc2 using only 2 cores kills me in customs/3v3/4v4 battles. Sure these games aren't Crysis or anything, but they are fun to me, and have proven to me that core count and multi threading gaming makes a difference in performance across the board from eye candy to frame rates.

[DarthShader]

its more like games CAN use 2-4 cores now... doesnt mean it makes it a lot faster... i havent seen any game scale above 2 cores in a way that would make it justified to go for a quad if all you do is game... 5% extra performance, maybe 10%... hows that worth upgrading or paying more?

Even in GTA4? Starcraft2?

[BababooeyHTJ]

Sayaa isn't a big gamer. It's not the first time that he has made a comment about how a fast cpu, or more cores don't make a difference with gaming. I'm not going to list the games that do benefit from a quad but its no small list anymore and it is growing. You don't have to look too far to find some benchmarks to see that either. Pcgameshardware even mentions like ten games the benefit from a hexcore.