New tests of Intel's just-launched Core i7-980X is potentially much faster than existing chips but also faces noticeable limits. The first mainstream six-core processor is fastest in creative tasks such as 3D modeling, Photoshop filters and video encoding, many of which are aware of multithreaded code and can use six cores. The performance gap over a quad-core i7 at the same 3.33GHz speed is usually at least 20 percent higher and as much as 70 percent higher.
