Intel's Turn to be in the Spotlight

Just after AMD's launch of its latest server chip last week, now its Intel's turn to gather audience.
Intel launch its newest generation of desktop processors on 17th of November. Called as Core i7, the main aim of Intel is to attract users of high-end desktop and gaming field.

This launching make Intel way ahead than its rival AMD by a good margin of few months, since AMD's comparable desktop processor are scheduled to launch early next year.
An analyst. Patrick Wang said, "AMD now just doesn't have a competitive chip against Intel on the desktop"

The Core i7 is almost four to six times faster than any Intel's platform, says the company, Core i7 comes with a great power efficiency than ever, it is based on same 45-nanometer technology that first was seen in server chip known as Xeon, which launched earlier this year.

The 45-nm is a new technology in chips world and of-course with new improved circuitry which is way smaller than it previous, 65-nm gen, makes them more faster and enables company to manufacture them at low cost. The latest Core i7 chips are based on a new designed micro architecture called Nehalem, which includes a major design changes such as power management and integrated memory control.

The first three quad-core of Core i7 chips from Intel will follow technology called "Hyperthreading", which enhance chip to execute up to 8 threads simultaneously on 4 processing cores, which significantly increases their processing power. Hyperthreading was introduce in earlier Intel chips like Pentium 4 chips and some Xeon processors.

QuickPath, a new micro architecture is also introduce in Core i7 that integrates memory controller into each microprocessor. QuickPath will replace Front Side Bus used in Xeon and Itanium platform of Intel. This will increase the bandwidth directly available to the processor, reducing lag time before a CPU can executing the next instruction.

"Core i7 will be one of the first Intel chips to integrate a memory controller," says Shane Rau, PC analyst at research firm IDC, "though it is something AMD has had for a while."

The first chips being released are quad-core desktop models, the 920, 940, and 965 Extreme. Clock speeds are 2.66 GHz, 2.93 GHz, and 3.2 GHz, respectively, and prices in batches of 1,000 are $284, $562, and $999.

Intel plans to release Core i7 models for servers in the first half of next year and models for notebooks in the second half.

Intel is taking no chances with Core i7. The company has spent millions to test the chips and ensure flaws in it don't trip it up, says The New York Times.