Several partners and sources close to Intel have recently been known to address the upcoming 32nm Gulftown 6-core monster as Intel Core i9. This doesn’t come as much of a surprise, considering that the company is structuring its Core lineup to feature odd numbers, beginning with its dual-core lineup also known as Core i3.

As we’ve mentioned several times before, the 32nm Gulftown 6-core (or hexa-core) chip will launch in 1H 2010 as the first chip in the Westmere family, the successor to Nehalem. Intel Core i9 will appeal to a highly enthusiast market niche, as it is based solely on socket LGA 1366 and retains compatibility with the X58 chipset which isn’t going anywhere in the foreseeable future.

From a clearly analytical perspective, Core i9 Gulftown can be viewed as Core i7 + 2, with six physical cores, a total thread count of 12 and a 50 percent L3 cache increase over Core i7 Bloomfield. We should also remind enthusiasts that Gulftown will not include an IGP core alongside the 32nm CPU, so nothing changes on the graphics front.