For past few years, Intel has been following the Tick-Tock cycle, Tick is the year when Intel mainly updates the manufacturing process and Tock is the year when Intel introduces new Core architecture. In 2005, Intel started producing 65nm chips (Tick), where as in 2006 Intel introduced a completely new Conroe micro architecture (Tock) and last year was a Tick year as Intel started using 45nm manufacturing process. Now, its 2008 and it’s Intel’s turn to introduce a new chip architecture. Intel has already announced that it will launch processors based on the new Nehalem architecture by end of November.
The new Core i7 is not just new core architecture, it will also bring along on die memory controller, QuickPath interface and support of triple channel DDR3 memory. The new QuickPath interface will give processors throughput of 4.8GT/s. The Core i7 will have a three times the memory bandwidth at 32GB/s compared to 11GB/s found on Core 2 Processor when they were launched in 2006. Intel will also add L3 cache and Hyper-Treading technology that will support 8-threads simultaneously to the new processor.
Intel will introduce three Core i7 processors at launch: 2.66GHz Core i7-920 for $284, 2.93GHz Core i7-940 for $562 and 3.20GHz Core i7 Extreme 965 for $999. Below are the latest reviews for the new Core i7 processors and the general concise is that the new processors are blazing fast. We totally agree with Hardcoreware’s conclusion “As far as AMD goes, I almost felt bad when I had to compare their fastest quad-core to some of Intel’s slowest.” In fact, most of the reviewers haven’t even bothered to compare the new processors with AMD, instead they compared the new processors with last generation Intel’s Core 2 Quad processors.

Intel Core i7 Reveiws:

ExtremeTech

Anand Tech

Hardcoreware

Legion Hardware

Toms Hardware

Hardocp

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