Back in January at this year's CES show, Intel was giving the press glimpses of a rig in their booth dubbed the V8. It is essentially a dual-socket workstation platform outfitted with a pair of quad-core Xeon processors for a total of eight cores - hence the "V8". The enterprise platform that this box was built around is based on Intel's 5000X chipset, aka Blackford, and it supports up to 32GB of FBDIMM serial memory. HotHardware has a component build-up of a more current Intel V8 machine here, with preliminary benchmarks, pictures and more details on this 8-core dual Xeon powerhouse:

If you flip through the SiSoft SANDRA screenshots above you see just how much raw horsepower is lurking under this rig's hood. The Processor Arithmetic and Multimedia benchmark scores are more than double those of a Core 2 Duo QX6800. And the Memory Bandwidth benchmark reported maximum bandwidth scores in the neighborhood of 4GB/s, which is low by today's standards and about 1GB/s off the mark set by the QX6800.

We also ran a default 3DMark06 test and a multi-threaded Cinebench v9.5 benchmark on this rig and were thoroughly impressed. The overall 3Dmark06 score was 13,002 (SM2.0=5,104 / HDR & SM3.0=4,932); the CPU score was 6,556 - almost 500 points higher than the rig Intel was showing off at CES. And the rig completed the Cinebench rendering pass in only 10 seconds, which is about 4-5 seconds faster then a quad-core Core 2 Extreme QX6800.