The was a flagship desktop processor released in early 2010. It was famously the first consumer processor to feature six physical cores and 12 threads .

: Uses Hyper-Threading to allow each core to process two instruction streams simultaneously.

: A hallmark "Extreme" feature that simplifies overclocking for enthusiasts.

: A "Tick" in Intel’s roadmap that brought more cores and 12MB of L3 cache while staying within the same 130W power envelope as previous quad-core chips.