Intel's 'Nehalem' To Launch Sooner

Originally scheduled to launch in November or December this year, Intel’s Nehalem-based Bloomfield processors will now launch in September along with X58 chipsets, sources at motherboard makers revealed. However, the sources pointed out that CPUs and motherboards will not officially appear in the channel until early October.

We took an early look at Nehalem in a quad-core configuration running at 2.93 GHz. In our very early tests, our Nehalem part performed quite impressively. It beat out the competition by fairly significant margins, proving that Intel’s architectural changes is definitely on the positive side. Our part was able to outperform equally configured systems with current processors from both AMD’s camp and Intel’s own by margins between 20 to 30 percent.

Keep in mind that Nehalem no longer uses a traditional front-side bus (FSB), and instead uses an external multiplier to control the link between CPU core, memory controller, and north-bridge.

According to several of our sources, Intel is well on its way with silicon yield, and early samples confirm this. With our own sample in house, we were able to overclock our samples by nearly 1 GHz. What are the performance figures for a quad-core Nehalem system running at nearly 4 GHz? We’ll come back with more as soon as we develop a viable suite of benchmarks to show some real-world gaming and productivity performance.

Stay tuned!

  • RADIO_ACTIVE
    Sweet!
    Me wanna get one. Intel has really stepped it up lately.
    Reply
  • shadowthor
    Looks good for anyone looking to build a new system.
    Reply
  • cah027
    I might finally retire my AMD 2400+ system and build one of these with a 4870X2 :)
    Reply
  • doomsdaydave11
    :O
    Reply
  • Looks like Intel a starting to feel the AMD threat!!!
    Reply
  • gm0n3y
    Why release it in September when its not going to actually be available until October? Is that even technically considered a release?
    Reply
  • shadowthor
    probably samples will be released during september for reviews to hype the nehalem launch. xizel1 quit spamming.
    Reply
  • gm0n3y
    @xizel1,

    Yes, I'm sure Intel is very afraid of AMD. They know that AMD is just pretending to suck badly so that they can pounce on Intel once their guard is down.
    Reply
  • DXRick
    How will the triple channel DDR3 memory thing be handled? Will we start seeing 3 packs of DDR3 1G and 2G (3G and 6G total)? It wouldn't make much sense to only get 3x .5G sticks.
    Reply
  • elerick
    I've got to be honest I feel both Intel and AMD, I have had a 3.8ghz Air cooled 6300 for over two years. Is it even worth my time to hope that this new chip stock 2.93 beats mine in gaming, etc? I am bored with my old stuff I want something exciting and new is this it?
    Reply