Our friends from PClab.pl have managed to score a sample of Intel's upcoming Gulftown Core i9 processor. Intel's 32nm, 6-core beast was put through its paces on three motherboards and the PClab crew compared the results to Core i5, Core i7, Core 2 Quad and Phenom II parts.

As expected, the 6-core clocked at 2800MHz made short work of the competition in all multi-core optimized benchmarks, but clock-per-clock, core-per-core, the Gulftown is not much faster than Core i5 or Core i7 processors. Professional users stand to benefit a great deal from the additional 2 cores and Hyperthreading support, but this is clearly not a CPU for gamers and regular consumers.

One of the major upshots of the new 32nm process is a significant reduction in power consumption. In most scenarios, Gulftown uses less juice than Core i7 and Core 2 Quad parts, which means a great deal in server applications. At 42°C it was also the coolest CPU in the test. PClab did not complete their overclocking tests and claim they'll have another go at it. However, they managed to squeeze out 4.3GHz on air, without much effort.

Check it out here.