Intel Nehalem's Market Named Leaked to be Core i7

Making its way around the Internet late last week was speculation of the official name for Intel’s future processor microarchitecture, currently codenamed Nehalem.

If the rumors are to be correct, the Intel Core i7 and Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition processors will officially be announced August 11 with an expected launch date of Q4 2008.

Nahalem is expected to be initially manufactured with a 45nm process and be available with two, four, or eight cores, for up to 731 million transistors in the quad core variant. A very exciting aspect of the new architecture is the new integrated memory controller, called the Intel QuickPath Interconnect, with DDR3 SDRAM support, which will eliminate the bottleneck that was the front side bus and which had been haunting Intel for years. This should result in a substantial performance increase despite Intel’s competition, AMD, having been using an integrated memory controller in their processors for years.

Another feature of Nahalem will be the re-introduction of Hyper-Threading technology, which was used previously in the Pentium 4 series of processors. Hyper-Threading allows a single core to run an adjacent virtual core, allowing for two threads per actual core, making for potential performance gains. With all the added performance of the upcoming Nahalem processors, power usage is not expected to rise much, providing for greater performance-per-watt efficiency.

Nehalem will come in variants for desktops, servers, and notebooks. The upcoming home desktop variant is codenamed Bloomfield and will use the new LGA1366 socket, making it incompatible with all previous generation motherboards.

  • yadge
    I don't really like the name much. But it's still exciting news, I can't wait to see more info about nehalem.
    Reply
  • caqde
    ... Who picked that name..... Doesn't make any sense. why?
    Reply
  • kitsilencer
    It honestly doesn't matter what it's called. As long as it performs as promised, I couldn't care if it was called Dick Cheney.
    Reply
  • lol i7 like ipod or iporn
    Reply
  • reann
    tk9lol i7 like ipod or iporn
    hope they dont get sued by apple? ^_^
    Reply
  • jaragon13
    kitsilencerIt honestly doesn't matter what it's called. As long as it performs as promised, I couldn't care if it was called Dick Cheney.damn straight.although,if it were a single-syllable word,then it would be easier for the idiots to understand instead of said,'i7'
    Reply
  • Colegade
    I agree that the naming scheme is a little funky, and will most likely confuse the average joe when it comes to computers. But it does have a kind of awesomely futuristic way about it, Like it was out of iRobot or something. I don't really consider it to be in the same league as Apple's "i" scheme either though. I think it's cool, but werid- especially for Intel.
    Reply
  • Pei-chen
    Apple's marketing team at work? The new Apple MacBook powered by iTel i7 processor.
    Reply
  • sillyman
    Well, It does seem like intel is stealing the i naming scheme from apple but they aren't. Intel came out with the i386 and the i486 quite a while ago. That being said, I still think names that start with a little i are the worst.
    Reply
  • Samamba
    Intel Core i7, ready for Windows Seven! ¬¬
    Reply