Intel Core i7 Performance Preview

Welcome to Core i7

Core i7, or Nehalem as we've been calling it for the past year, becomes part of Intel's "Tock" step, which denotes a brand-new micro-architecture built on the current process node. "Tick" will come next year in the form of Westmere, a 32-nm shrink of Nehalem.

The top-of-the-line i7 processor will be the Extreme 965, at 3.20GHz. As is typical of all newly-launched Intel Extreme editions, this one will be sold at a price of $999 in quantities of 1,000. This means that you can expect a price of closer to $1,100 if you wish to own one. Moving downwards, the 2.93GHz model will sell for $562, while the mainstream 920 will be sold at $284.

Like previous Extreme products, the 965 will be a fully-unlocked chip with a Turbo multiplier capable of hitting 40x, the default being 24x. The 940 and 920 are capped at their stock multipliers (22x and 20x, respectively) and can only be overclocked by increasing the Base Clock, or BCLK for short. That tells us right away that these processors are going to be more of a challenge to overclock than anything from the Core 2 line-up, and we'll get into the specifics of why later.

Comprised of 731 million transistors on a surface area of 263mm^2, Intel's latest processor is a little bit of a strange beast, since it's larger in areal density than its predecessor (214mm^2), but uses less transistors. Why that's the case exactly, I'm unsure.

Each of the i7 processors to be launched later this month have identical pin and filter cap layouts on the back, which leads us to believe that each is identical inside, with the obvious multiplier and model code changes. In previous architectures, some of the filter caps would be laid out differently, or some would be missing on the smaller models, but not here. We could assume that smaller models, when eventually released, will look slightly different on the back.

As mentioned above, today's article is a preview, not a review, as there is a lot more testing that needs to be conducted that couldn't yet be focused on due to time. So, we'll be following-up with more specific content over the course of the next few weeks, including a deeper look at gaming performance and overclocking. We'll finish it all off with a proper "review" nearer to the official launch.

Today's article will be focusing primarily on two things. First will be simple performance scaling between the three new processors and three top processors from Intel's Kentsfield line-up, including the QX9770 and Q9450. The second will be a performance look at Core i7's new features, including Turbo and HyperThreading. I can assure you... these are results you won't want to skip over.