Intel Core i7 920 940 965 Review & Overclocking - PAGE 1

Today we get to publish our review on the long awaited Core i7 "Nehalem" 920, 940 and 965 Extreme, along with its Intel DX58SO motherboard based on the new X58 Northbridge and ICH10 southbridge.

Before talking about the Core i7 family (formerly known as Nehalem), I'll try to pre-empt some of your questions:

• Release date: Sometime later this November
• Core i7 920 runs at 2.66GHz, and will sell for $284
• Core i7 940 runs at 2.93GHz, and will sell for $562
• Core i7 965 Extreme runs at 3.20GHz, and will sell for $999
• The DX58SO is listed at some retailers already for around $350

The above processor pricing is in 1000 piece OEM quantities.

The Core i7 is quite a beast comprised of 731 million transistors, with a 263mm^2 die.

Nehalem is the 'tock' following the 'tick' of the Penryn (Core 2), and will itself be followed by the 'tick' of Westmere in 2009 and 'tock' of Sandy Bridge in 2010. Both Westmere and Sandy Bridge are planned to be built with a 32nm process, with Westmere being a "mere" shrink and optimization of Nehalem, and Sandy Bridge being a new architecture. But enough of the future for now.

For Nehalem, Intel's design philosophy consisted of an enhanced core with new performance features and the re-introduction of multi-threading. Of course a high preformance processor core - never mind four multi-threaded ones - need a lot of data to keep busy, therefore Intel designed a new cache hierarchy, and made a whole new platform based on its Quick Path Interconnect (hereafter QPI) and a new triple channel on-processor memory controller. While they were at it, they also added some new instructions and improved support for virtualization.

The following information on the Core i7 (Nehalem) architecture was taken from the Intel Development Forum papers.