High Performance and energy efficient? Intel Core i7 has arrived
Intel’s shiny new high-end desktop processor range has hit shelves. The new core i7 range, which were previously codenamed “Nehalem”, are based on a clever new micro-architecture that is designed to deliver high performance and be much more energy efficient.
Ever on the ball, Tech magazine TechNewsWorld spoke with Pund-IT analyst Charles King about the new chips: “Typically, when Intel makes an update as significant as Core i7, the first adopters are typically in the high-end desktop,” he said
“Given i7’s video graphics capabilities, it sounds like it’ll be a good choice for a high-end gaming PC,” he added.
King noted that Intel’s generally scale down new chips for the notebook market, and scales them up for the server crowd.
At the minute, you can get the new chip in Dell’s Studio XPS desktop featuring core i7-920 processors running at 2.66 and 2.93GHz, but the XPS 730x gaming box can support Intel’s 3.2GHz Extreme Edition processor,
The core i7 has had some significant improvements made from previous chips, For example the i7 is the first time that Intel has moved the system memory controller onto the CPU.
“This improves system performance and eliminates the traditional ‘north bridge’ that has been a standard part of Intel-based PCs and servers for over two decades. AMD made this same move in 2003, and others, including Sun and IBM, did it even earlier,” said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst for Insight 64.
“Better late than never,” he added.
The core i7 brings back hyper-threading, Brookwood noted, the last time this was seen was on the Pentium 4, but wasn’t present in earlier core designs.
“This improves performance by 15 to 20 percent for multi-threaded applications. Since the chip has four cores, and each core has two threads, a single chip looks like eight logical processors to Windows or Linux,” Brookwood noted.
The i7 processors use 8 processing threads, 8MB of Intel Smart Cache, and three channels of DDR3 1066MHz memory, which Intel says improves performance for data-intensive applications.
Intel noted that its i7 processors integrated memory controller handles the data flow between main memory and the execution engine, which results in faster time to memory and less latency for requests.
The company boasts that the i7 Extreme Edition 3.2GHz processor is the “highest performing processor on the planet”.
Brookwood said that scaled down versions for desktops and notebooks won’t become available until the third quarter of 2009, but you have just to wait until the first quarter of the year for two-way server versions,
“Versions for four-way servers won’t show up until late ‘09,” he said.
“This gives AMD’s Shanghai - announced last week - some breathing room in two- and four-way servers, and it gives AMD lots of room in the mainstream, sub-(US)$1,200 range, and value segments of the market,” he added.
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