Naked Core i7 980X Pictured

Popping the lid of a Core i7 980X CPU has high risk of destroying a $1000 chip, it takes some nice connections to be this confident. If you happen to work for Gigabyte and your job consists of marketing enthusiast hardware to the people, it certainly makes the task easier:

As you can see for yourself, Core i7 980X is based on Gulftown core, manufactured in 32nm process in Intel's manufacturing facilities, most likely in Oregon. The die itself measures only 248mm2, down from 263mm2 for 45nm-based Nehalem processors. Thus, going from 45nm to 32nm process enabled Intel to add two more processing cores, increase cache by 50% and still shed 15mm2 off the die size.