Gulftown isn't due until next year, but the engineering samples are already floating around. Fortunately for the general public, the overclocking legend Shamino got his hands on one of these and decided to see what this beast is capable of.

Shamino used LN2 cooling and managed to hit impressive 6.4GHz (or to be more precise 6.386MHz). Note however that the operating voltage was set to a rather high 2.02V.

The system ran stable with the cores at 5.9GHz, and did one round in 3DMark Vantage Performance with quite an impressive result. The CPU scored 55,177, which to some might not mean much, but you should know that the Performance Profile world record is currently 32,328 points, which puts Intel’s upcoming ace incredible 22,849 points ahead, which is pretty close to double.

Unfortunately for AMD and its newly announced Thuban CPUs, this came just in time to spoil AMD’s announcement fun, not to mention the fact that AMD will have a lot of work to do if Intel’s engineering samples give any indication of the actual performance.

You can check out the results here.