OC Workbench stipulated some information about a couple of upcoming Intel processors that will be released later this year. This includes the Core i7-980X, a new six-core Gulftown processor with a 3.33GHz clockspeed.

* Core i7-930″ (Bloomfield, 2.8GHz, tb/3.06GHz) 2 / 28

* “Core i7-980X Extreme Edition” (Gulftown, 3.33GHz, tb/3.6GHz) 3 / 16

* Core i5-680 (Clarkdale, 3.6GHz, tb/3.8GHz) 4 mid-May during the month

* “Core i7-880″ (Lynnfield, 3.06GHz, tb/3.73GHz) 2010/Q2

* “Core i3-550″ (Clarkdale, 3.2GHz, tb / No) 2010/Q2

* “Pentium E6700″ (Penryn, 3.43GHz) 2010/Q2

* “Core i7-970″ (Gulftown, 3.33GHz, tb/3.46GHz) 2010/Q3

Chinese website Expreview published some screenshots of Intel’s Gulftown, this 32nm six-core LGA1366 part is expected to be launched in the first half of 2010 under the Core i9 brand. The sample operated at a frequency of 2.4GHz (18x133MHz) and features a massive 12MB L3 cache.

Gulftown will be socket 1366 compatible and work with all X58 motherboards after a BIOS upgrade. Check out the pics.

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In what one could describe as to be expected, Intel has declared the Gulftown is slated to become the Core i9 series of processors when launched.

(Click the above image for the large version)

The news from INPAI.com.cn follows earlier decisions by Intel to rebrand the Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad chips as Core i3 and add confusion to consumers who were actually starting to understand the rebranding when Intel originally shifted to the Core 2 branding years ago. Now while the average enthusiast is going to know what is going on and not be fooled by what is going on here, the average consumer is going to get screwed into thinking Core i3 is something new, much like NVIDIA has done with the the 8800GT.

As long as Intel continues down this road for the future and does NOT rebrand existing products down the road, this could work out in advantage for everyone. Staying the course, everyone would know that Core i3 would a much different chip than Core i9, however surely AMD will change their naming to counteract Intel’s Core i-series branding, much like they did when releasing the Athlon XP’s.