Intel launches Core i7 line of desktop processors

A day after Intel launched its new line of Core i7 desktop processors in San Francisco, the new chip made its first India appearance at a glittering event organised at the Taj President, Mumbai.

The Core i7 will be almost four to six times faster than Intel's current platform, says the company, and will have greater power efficiency than ever. It is based on the 45-nanometer production technology that first appeared in a server chip called Xeon (AKA Penryn), which debuted earlier this year.

The 45-nm chips utilise smaller circuitry than the previous, 65-nm generation, making them faster, and also enabling Intel to manufacture them more cheaply. The new Core i7 chips are based on a newly designed micro architecture called Nehalem, which includes major design changes in areas such as power management and integrated memory control.

The first three quad-core Core i7 chips from Intel will reintroduce "hyperthreading" technology, which gives the chips the ability to execute 8 threads simultaneously on 4 processing cores, greatly increasing their processing power. Hyperthreading was seen earlier in Pentium 4 chips and some Xeon processors from Intel.

There is also the faster unaligned cache access and faster synchronization primitives. Intel has also implemented a new 2nd level branch predictor to avoid situations when execution units stand idle. Yet another improvement is the cache sub-system that has been redesigned from scratch.

There is a 2nd level 512 entry translation look-aside buffer (TLB) in addition to the 1st level TLB to reduce the TLB miss rate. In addition to this, there is also three-level cache hierarchy: 64KB L1 (32KB for data and 32KB for instructions), 256 KB L2 cache per core, 8 MB L3 cache (2 MP per core) shared by all cores. This is different from what Intel used to do until now - all cache on the processor.

Core i7 processors are also different from their predecessors in that they have "QuickPath," a new micro architecture that integrates memory controller into each microprocessor. QuickPath will replace Front Side Bus used in Xeon and Itanium platforms. The move increases the bandwidth directly available to the processor, reducing lag time before a CPU can begin executing the next instruction.

Turbo Boost technology allows the cores to bump up the clock speeds when deemed necessary. This quad-core sports 731 million transistors. Combined with the Intel X58 chipset-based motherboards with LGA1366 socket, these are incompatible with older motherboards. Currently, these can only be used with motherboards based on the Intel X58 chipset.

Intel has released three different models of the Core i7 - all quad core variants with hyperthreading:

• Core i7 920 clocked at 2.66 GHz priced at $284 (approximately Rs.14, 063),
• Core i7 940 clocked at 2.66 GHz priced at $562 (approximately Rs.27, 830),
• Core i7 965 XE (Extreme Edition) clocked at 3.2 GHz priced at $999 (approximately Rs.49, 470)

(Prices are per unit in lots of 1000)

Prakash Bagri, Director - Marketing, Intel South Asia said on occasion of the India launch, "Intel has delivered the fastest desktop processor on Earth to the most demanding users on Earth, the ones who are using their PCs for video, gaming and music. When you couple, what is Intel's biggest leap in chip design, with other incredible innovations like Intel's solid state drives, the Core i7 processor has refined the computer of tomorrow".