Intel Core i7 – Nehalem Arrives and FSB Departs

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Introduction

For the last five years Intel has completely dominated the CPU market with the Core architecture. When Intel finally put the Pentium processor out to pasture, it was a shock to see a new name finally hit the market. After all, Pentium was the first processor that really put Intel ahead of the rest of the CPU market.

Intel’s Core architecture first made its appearance in the notebook field; with low power consumption, higher memory bandwidth and IPC (Instructions Per Clock) compared to the Pentium 4 series processor, the writing was on the wall for the Netburst architecture.

Core 2 finally made its debut to the desktop in the form of the Core 2 Duo which was Intel’s first true dual core processor. Rather than having the two cores having to communicate along the FSB and back to the chipset like the Pentium D or Pentium Extreme Edition, Core 2 was actually able to do direct core-to-core synchronising through the shared L2 cache on the processor. While new by design, the processor still used the same LGA775 socket as well as the QDR FSB of the Pentium 4, meaning it still had a weakness compared to the AMD K8 and K10; its memory controller was simply not able to keep up with the CPU.

Today Intel’s CPU, formally known as Nehalem arrives and with it comes a new architecture along with a new bus. Welcome Core i7!