INTEL core I7 proccessor

Intel’s high end Core 2 Duo CPUs have always been at the top of the performance charts right from their launch. And Intel have just bettered themselves with their all new CPU line up, the Core i7 (codenamed Nehalem), which raises the performance bar even higher.

Performance
From all initial reports, we knew the Core i7 965 Extreme would better any earlier desktop CPU; and putting this new CPU and platform to task only confirmed our speculation. As usual, we ran WorldBench 6.0, PC World’s own benchmarking suite that consists of real world applications like Adobe Photoshop, Autodesk 3ds MAX, Microsoft Office 2003, etc.ntel has finally let go of the FSB concept and has instead opted for a ‘Quick-Path’ interconnect, similar to, but not exactly like the HyperTransport that AMD has been when they switched to 64-bit CPUs. Hyper Threading Technology that allows a single core to run two threads simultaneously (depending on the processing that the two cores need) is back with the Core i7 (Intel discarded it when they introduced dual cores) and this means each of the four cores of the Core i7 have a virtual core. As on the date of this review there are three models of the Core i7 in production — 920 (2.66GHz), 940 (2.93GHz) and the 965 Extreme (3.2GHz), which we are reviewing here.


The Platform
The Core i7 CPUs are based on a completely new architecture and are not compatible with the socket 775 motherboards. The new socket is referred to as LG A1366 (the 1366 refers to the number of pin connections on the CPU; the current Core 2 Duos are based on LG A775). These CPUs are currently supported by Intel’s X58 chipset which itself has something new to offer—it supports both, SLI and CrossFire dual graphics technology. On the memory side, the Core i7 CPUs have the memory controller built in (similar to the AMD CPUs) and they support three channel memory (similar to dual channel but with three RAM sticks) up to DDR 3 1600MHz. The memory throughout and overall chipset performance has seen a substantial increase.