Intel Core i7 Platform Evaluation

Intel has been described as a 10,000 pound charging rhino and with good reason, they are a large company with deep pockets and access to some major resources. So when they move you can bet they build up some terrific momentum. During the years of the Pentium 4 they were caught grazing by the small and nimble AMD who snuck up on them with the Athlon and Athlon 64 CPUs. But once alerted, very much like that 10,000 pound rhino, they began to move, it was slow going at first and very hard to change directions once moving, but in the end they got all of that momentum and force aimed at getting the performance title back. This was handily done with the Core 2, but there was no slowing Intel down once moving. The charged right past a startled AMD who might not have even caught a glimpse at who blew past them, but they felt the wake for sure. Next up was Intel being first to the plate with the Kentsfield Quad Core CPU; this, while not a “true” quad core still had power and performance to spare. Now Intel has altered the rhino’s direction again. We finally see what the white coat wearing labs guys at Intel have been cooking up. So we bring you our 64-Bit evaluation of Nehalem, now called the i7. We will not go too deeply into the technical explanations of what Nehalem brings to the table but will concentrate on performance evaluation along with heat and power consumption.

Product: Intel Core i7  
Author: Sean Kalinich
Reviewed on: October 15th 2008
Product cost: See Below
Manufacturer: Intel
Spelling and Grammatical editor: Planetx64 Staff

{mospagebreak title=A CPU Divided}
What’s New?
The i7 is a new piece of silicon, it measures 263mm^2 and has over 731 million transistors. The i7 is larger than the 45nm QX9770 (214mm^2) but smaller than the QX9650 (286mm^2). What is interesting is that the i7 has less transistors than the QX9770 about 89 million less (QX9770 820 million transistors, i7 731 million transistors) but more than the QX9650 (731 Vs 582). The i7 is based off of Penryn (the P6) and even has the same pipeline size. It does have improvements in efficiency and power management yet Intel says that the Nehalem is the biggest architectural change to date.   So where are the principal differences?
The Dividing of the CPU:
Intel  has made a new distinction in the way a CPU is laid out. There are now two parts to the CPU. The Core and the Un-Core; the Core, as its name implies, consists of the execution units, L1 and L2 Cache, a memory ordering unit, paging, branch prediction and instruction reordering, scheduling and retirement functions. In a Quad Core i7 you will have four of these on the processor die.
The Un-Core is just about everything else; in the un-core you have the memory controller, L3 Cache, CPU I/O controllers and the QPI (QuickPath Interconnects)
Now this is not just a logical division but is also there for power management as the core and Un-core run in their own separate power planes.
{mospagebreak title=Power Management}
Power Management:
Since we are talking about power management; i7 brings something new to the Intel line up, this is in the form of:
An integrated Power Control Unit (PCU) and sensors
The replacement of clock gates with power gates
Reworking the L1 and L2 cache to increase the number of transistors from 6 to 8
Switching from Dynamic Domino Logic to static CMOS design. 

Now to understand all of this change I have to delve into each one a little bit.
The PCU that Intel has integrated into the Nehalem is unlike anything they have used before. This piece of CPU real-estate is about the same size as a 486 CPU (transistor count wise) has its own firmware and does nothing but monitor the CPUs power consumption, system requests, temperature, and CPU current and can makes its own decisions about power for the CPU despite what the OS may say, this prevents the rapid on/off power requests that can happen with OS driven power management. This PCU works in combination with the Power Gates, these new devices are exclusive to Intel and can actually shut off power to an inactive core while keeping the Core portion of the CPU on the same power plane. So like AMD’s Phenom you have each core able to operate at independent clocks and power usage, but unlike Phenom the Nehalem can almost completely shut off power to an inactive CPU Core. To further increase the difference, Nehalem can redirect some of that voltage to individual cores (in limited amounts) to improve single threaded performance. So this means that if only one core is active and getting close to being overworked the i7 can bump up the power to that core to give it a little boost. Intel calls this Turbo Mode. And can be adjusted by the number of cores active.
The move from 6T to 8T SRAM cells in the L1 and L2 cache was to reduce the amount of voltage needed to run these levels of cache. The next power saving feature was the shift from dynamic domino logic to static CMOS. Static CMOS uses less power than Domino logic and although there is a small performance hit from using it Intel has managed to almost negate this by improvements in some of the CPU algorithms and is still an overall improvement for the CPU that helps reduce the overall amount of power needed for the CPU to run.
{mospagebreak title=Memory and Cache}
Cache:
The Cache structure on the i7 has also changed, gone is the large L2 cache that was present with the Core 2 Now we see a return to smaller L2 cache (256k per Core) and the inclusion of a large (8MB) L3 fully-shared inclusive cache. And there have also been a few changes in each level of cache. L1 is slightly slower at 4 cycles Vs 3, L2 is no longer shared and is part of each core. The L3 cache is similar to AMD’s L3 cache in that is it shared between all of the cores of the CPU. By making it inclusive Intel has reduced the amount of core snoop traffic as the CPU needs to only look in the L3 cache to see if an instruction is present in cache (L1 and L2 are replicated in L3).
Internal Memory Controller:
One of the biggest differences is the inclusion of a memory controller into the CPU die, now AMD has been doing this for years while Intel has said it was not needed, but as the FSBs increased we saw memory performance decrease. This was the impetus that lead Intel to make this change; as it stands now even with a QX9770 and 2000MHz DDR3 you are not seeing the full potential of your CPU and RAM due to limitations of the older architecture. Intel’s new memory controller also breaks the conventional standard of Dual Channel memory; Nehalem’s is a Tri-Channel memory controller and can allow for up to three DIMMs per Channel this helps to improve memory performance and to get the most out of higher speed DDR3 memory. Intel estimates about a 40% improvement over current Dual Channel DDR3 FSB systems.
QPI (QuickPath Interconnect)
Intel’s QPI is very similar to AMD’s HyperTransport.  The QPI is a bi-directional connection or pathway to replace the old and outdated FSB.  It is capable of up to 6.4GT/s. Each link is 20bits wide with 2 bytes (16 bits) of effective bandwidth this gives it roughly 12.8 GB/s in each direction or 25.6GB/s per link total.
And I have said it before, Intel now gets to reap the benefits of AMD’s early adoption of this type of interconnect. They will not face the same performance and stability with applications from adding the memory controller to the die and using an internal interconnect like AMD did.
{mospagebreak title=HyperThreading}
The Return of HyperThreading:
In the old Networst (sic), P4 days HyperThreading was something of a joke. It was inefficient, power hungry and in most cases a complete waste. So why bring it back? To understand why it failed before we have to take a very quick look at what it does. HyperThreading was the friendly name for SMT or Symmetric Multi-Threading. This allows each physical core to appear as two logical core and therefore request additional instruction threads from the system (two per CPU core). With Networst and the P4 the pipelines were too long, the paths were not wide enough, CPU cache too small, and the memory bandwidth was nowhere near enough to make this viable.
Now with Nehalem we have dramatically increased memory bandwidth, larger Cache, short wide pipelines, new and deeper buffers to handle the extra processing load. With the i7 we see a CPU that is capable of efficiently handling the extra load that HyperThreading brings to the table.
Another big change is the core bus speed the i7 runs at. While with Core 2 we saw an eventual 400MHz the i7 has a much lower core bus of 133Mhz CPU and memory speed are adjusted by multipliers and by the speed of the QPI for each chip.

{mospagebreak title=One Last Thing}
One Last Thing on Change:
The Last change is not just to the CPU but to the platform. The i7 has changed sockets to handle the IMC (integrated memory controller)as well as other CPU to mainboard I/O paths and jumped from 775 pins (or lands) to 1366 pins. This means new Chipset and mainboard time. For testing Intel sent out an X58 based desktop board in the form of the DX58SO or Smackover (I think SmackDown is copyrighted so they could not use that). The feature of the DX58SO will be covered in detail in a later evaluation. But it is a very different design and implementation that what we have become used to from Intel. Both Asus and GIGABYTE have x58 boards ready and we will be talking about those in depth later too.

{mospagebreak title=Performance – The Rigs}

Performance:
As I mentioned above I did not want to spend too much time discussing the architecture and new features, if you are really interested go and take a look at the white papers and IDF documentation on Intel’s site. What I want to show is the performance of the i7, and in particular what you can expect from it in a 64-bit OS (Vista x64 Ultimate). I also wanted to be able to show if i7 represents a viable upgrade.
When AMD released the AM2 there was no performance gain to be had over the 939 Athlons. This presented a problem for many AMD users. So by the end of my testing I want to be able to tell you if i7 is a smart choice of if you should just stick with the Core 2 line for now.
Test systems
Intel  i7:
Core Extreme i7 -965 (3.2GHz 6.4GT/s QPI)
Core Extreme i7 -940 (2.93Ghz 4.8GT/s QPI)*
Core i7 -920 (2.66GHz 4.8GT/s QPI)
All core models are 130W TDP and have 8MB shared L3 Cache.
Intel DX58SO desktop mainboard (BIOS SO2260)
QIMONDA 3 x 1GB DDR3 1067 CL
Foxconn 9800GTX-512N
Intel X25 80GB SSD
Sony SATA DVD-RW
Mushkin 1000Watt PSU
* 940 performance was simulated by down clocking the 965 to 940 specifications (4.8GTs QPI and adjusting the multipliers)

Intel Core 2 Quad
QX9770 (3.2GHz, 1600MHz FSB, 12 MB L2 Cache)
Asus P5E64 WS Evolution
Kingston KHX13000D3LLK2/2GX (2x1GB DDR3 1625MHz @ 1600MHx 7-7-7-20)
Foxconn 9800GTX-512N
Intel X25 80GB SSD
Sony SATA DVD-RW
Mushkin 1000Watt PSU
Corsair Nautilus 500 used for cooling

Intel Xeon (the V8)
2 x Intel Xeon X5365 Processors (Quad Core 3.0GHz 1333MHz FSB)
Asus Z7S WS
4 GB (2x2GB) Kingston 667MHz FBDIMMs
Intel X25 80GB SSD
Foxconn 9800GTX-512N
Sony SATA DVD-RW
Cooler Master UCP 1100 PSU

AMD
AMD Phenom x4 9850 (Clocked to 9950 2.6 GHz)
Asus M3A32-MVP (BIOS 1203)
2GB (2x1GB) Kingston KHX9200D2K2/2G (@1066 5-5-5-18)
Foxconn 9800GTX-512N
Intel X25 80GB SSD
Sony SATA DVD-RW
Mushkin 1000Watt PSU
Corsair Nautilus 500 used for cooling

All systems were running Microsoft Windows Vista x64 Ultimate
nVidia driver version 178.24 was used for all testing.
I want to make a note here about my choice of GPU, at the time of writing it was the most powerful nVidia GPU I had on hand. I did have a pair of ATi HD4850s but there was a flaw in the available drivers that caused the DX and OpenGL subsystems to lag ad show about ½ expected performance unless the tests were run back to back 5-6 times. I contacted Intel who forwarded the information to ATi. As of publication I have not heard from ATi about a fix for this.  I hope they address this issue quickly or it will hurt their sales with this new platform.
* at the time of publication Catalyst 8-10 fixes the performance issue, however there was not enough time to re run all tests with the ATi HD4850.

{mospagebreak title=Performance – Applications}

Performance – Applications:
Let’s talk about application performance, the one thing that everyone probably wants to know is if the i7 is going to give new levels of performance over the existing Core CPUs or if (like the AM2) it is just a bump and one that can be easily bridged with a little over clocking.  Well with our usual tests in hand we have a combination of synthetic and real world tests to show you that the i7 is not just a bump in performance.

FutureMark:
From FutureMark we bring PCMark Vantage into our application testing pool, although a synthetic benchmark it still gives us a decent baseline for comparison and makes the numbers crowd happy.

Wow, that is really all I can think to say about the way the i7 simply outperforms everyone in 64-Bit performance. For 32 Bit performance only the 920 lags behind the QX9770.

Sisoft Sandra 2009:
Another numbers synthetic, Sandra 2009 is good for giving RAW performance numbers and also for giving a baseline for comparison.

CPU Arithmetic	Other Tests

The numbers here are interesting, it seems for sheer CPU power on the V8 can out do the i7. For Multi-core efficiency and memory bandwidth the i7 cannot be touched.

Everest 4.6:
The third in our synthetic test group I only used Everest for backing up the memory performance numbers for Sandra 2009, although it is useful for much more than that.

i7 965	i7 940	i7 920
QX9770	V8	Phenom 9950

Again we see the tri-channel memory bringing the speed back to DDR3.

Cinebench R10 x64:
The last of our truly synthetic tests is Cinebench R10 x64, this test (From Maxon the makers of Cinema 4D) is intended to give a fair evaluation of your systems ability to render images and to support real-time OpenGL rendering.

Again the i7 stands head and shoulders above all but the V8 monster.

Photoshop CS3:
Photoshop is the industry standard for image manipulation. For my testing I used Driverheaven.net’s Photoshop CS2 benchmark.

Again we see the i7 965 at the top of the heap while the QX9770 come in second place, followed by the i7 940 and 920.

HyperPi 0.99b:
Although not truly a real world test HyperPi is still not a completely synthetic test. It is also perfect for testing memory to CPU to HDD performance and stability. I ran a 32M run on all cores for each system.

i7 965	i7 940	i7 920
QX9770	V8	Phenom 9950

Here the numbers are interesting, the i7 965 (18:30:172 best core time) is at the top of the heap but coming in at a close 2^nd is the QX9770 (19:00:204 Best Core time) beating out the i7 940 by almost 50 seconds (19:50:102 Best core time).

Lightwave 9.3 x64:
Lightwave is one of the industry standards for 3D animation and a great test of system performance. Lightwave is also very CPU dependant, but also needs a fast HDD and memory for best results.
For testing I used the Moonbase Scene and rendered frame 32 @ 1920×1080 (HD 1080i) with 7-Pass PLD for AA, Gaussian Sharp reconstruction filter and classic cameras. Segment memory was set to 512MB.

And the King is dethroned, previously the V8 system was the fastest Ligthwave rendering system I have ever worked with (yes there are faster out there but they are massive systems) However we have a new speed king here. The i7 965 was able to outperform the V8 by 9 seconds. This might not sound like much but over a 60 frame render it is 9 minutes saved on your render time.

AutoGK 2.45:
For my Transcoding/encoding tests I used AutoGK 2.45 to transcode a standard 2-1/2 hour movie from DVD to 100% quality AVI. AutoGK2.45 uses virtual dub for its transcode but is more efficient and can spread the work load over multiple CPUs (cores) making it a good test for multi-core performance.

For Transcoding all of the i7 CPUs simply walked away from the others in the group. This is due mainly to the faster memory speeds and also better SSE code in the i7.

Application Performance Summary:
We had posed the question; is the i7 going to be a leap or a step in terms of performance. Well it seems the answer is, for the most part, a resounding yes for application performance. The i7 brings a better system to the table with its tri channel memory support IMC (internal memory controller) better caching structure and improved hyperthreading (over the P4). While the Massive V8 system still holds the crown for many of the synthetic CPU tests, there were only a few places where the entire i7 family did not win out over the competition. Even the lowest clocked i7 was able to outperform the rest of the crowd in Transcoding, and (other than the V8) in Lightwave as well. Looks like the i7 is will handle just about all of the apps you throw at it.

{mospagebreak title=Performance – Gaming}

Gaming:

There have been rumors and speculation around the Internet that the new i7 is not meant for gaming.
That Intel developed it for use in workstations and more professional systems. Well we are going to take a look and see if there is any truth to those rumors or if the i7 really can bring the same performance jump as we saw with our application testing. To find out we ran five current games at the highest playable resolutions (or max resolution for our 24” monitor) and also at minimal settings (1280×1024)
each game was played through 3 times and the median numbers recorded for minimum, maximum and average frames per second. Settings for each game at high hi-res and low-res are shown in each game section. All frame rates were recorded with FRAPS 2.9.

FutureMark – 3DMark Vantage:
3DMark Vantage like PCMark is not a real measure of performance, it is simply too easy to fool this test. A perfect example of this is the integration of the Agiea PhysX components into the nVidia GPU driver package. This gives an artificial bump to the CPU score which is not present when running an ATi card. Now I would not have a problem with this if it were to bump up the GPU score, but it is a false representation of what your CPU is actually capable of.

As you can see here 3DMark performance is affected very little by the CPU, and this is another reason that synthetic test can be misleading. In real gaming AI, physics, and depending on your choice of Audio Card/Codec, sound all play into gaming performance. Sound is especially important as sound and video are usually coded to stay in sync (or the game would be unusually odd to play). Even so we can still see that the i7 show it has power to spare for gaming, bear in mind that the CPU scores are artificially inflated by the nVidia PhysX package in the drivers I used.

Assassin’s Creed –DX10:
Assassin’s Creed can be a rough game on a system, it does have some rather bland AI but over all its graphics and audio tend to slow your game play down if you do not have a powerful enough system.
For my testing I ran the opening level from the fight in the courtyard through to your “death”.
Settings are shown below.

Hi-Res	Low-Res

Hi-Res:
Under most high resolution gaming the CPU takes a back seat to the GPU. I found it interesting that in Assassin’s Creed the CPU made a rather big difference. The i7 965 showed a 20 frame per second lead over the older generation of CPUs. The 940 also showed a healthy performance lead while the 920 performed as well as the QX9770.

Low-Res:
Low resolution gaming can help take the GPU out of the equation when looking at raw CPU performance. For Assassin’s Creed we see the i7 take another healthy lead.

Crysis –Warhead:
I am not a big fan of Crysis or Warhead, but as Warhead is a popular and current game I wanted to include it. According to Crytek it is optimized for multi-core CPUs and Multi-GPU play. This is great but Multi-Core can have different levels of compatibility, and what might play well on a dual core CPU might play horribly on a quad. For testing I used the “Call me Ishmael” level from after the EMP blast through to the end. Settings are shown below:

Hi-Res	Lo-Res

Hi-Res:
In Crysis the i7 runs a little faster than all of the other CPUs tested granted not a big one (less than 4 FPS), even the entry level i7 920 shows a 1 FPS lead over the QX9770.
Low-Res
The i7’s lead is more evident in our low resolution testing with the 965 having a 19 FPS lead over the QX9770 and even the 920 was able to out the QX9770 by just over 3 FPS.

Lost Planet Extreme Conditions –DX10:
Lost Planet is an older game (released in January 2007) and was one of the first DX 10 and quad-core optimized games. It still can put a hurting on your system due to the sheer amount of fog and particle and other effects in play. For testing I ran through the complete first mission. Settings are show below:

Hi-Res	Lo-Res

Hi-Res:
Lost Planet was interesting, for some reason the AI seemed sluggish, game play was smooth at the resolution and setting chosen but it was not the same game. This was reflected in a lower frame rate than the Core, Phenom, and the V8, the fact that the V8 was able to run faster than the i7 leads me to think that Lost Planet does not like the i7’s hyper threading.  Since it was designed to run on a quad core CPU it might not like the extra thread per core or indeed be able to utilize them without losing performance.

Low-Res:
When we remove the GPU from the equation here we do see the 965 jump out in front while the 940 and 920 get good numbers. However these numbers were not enough to out run the Phenom 9850 (@ 2.6GHz) or the V8. In this test the QX9770 lagged behind the rest of the pack.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare:
Call of Duty 4 is a great game with good visuals and a large and massive “bar fight” AI system. While Call of Duty 4 is not going to slam your GPU that massive AI can bog down your CPU and make the game feel sluggish. For testing I ran the “Crew Expendable” level from your drop off on the ship to the end.

Hi-Res	Lo-Res

Hi-Res:
Performance here is very similar across the board with only the QX9770 lagging behind by 12 FPS.

Low-Res:
Here the differences are more apparent but still there is less than a 16 FPS difference from first to last place.

Bioshock:
Bioshock is a creation of the same minds that brought us System Shock 2 and features good (although a little cartoonish) graphics. AI is a little light as most of your opponents follow easily recognizable patterns. It is still a great game to play and good for a basic DX10 test. For my testing I ran the “Welcome to Rapture” level. Settings are shown below.

Hi-Res	Lo-Res

Hi-Res:
In Bioshock the numbers were all over the place with the 965 coming out on top and followed by the V8 and the 940. The QX9770 and i7 920 tied for fourth place while the Phenom lagged behind.

Low-Res:
In our low resolution testing we still see the 965 out in front but this time the V8 is in second place followed by the Phenom.

Gaming Conclusion:
The world of PC gaming is becoming less and less CPU dependant, at least for frame rate. Where you see performance impacted is all of the other parts of the game outside of rendering the visual environment. As games start having more complex AI and environments you will see the need for a more powerful CPU. This will be true until the GPGPU becomes more mainstream that it is right now. The i7 has an design advantage here in that it can theoretically deal with more of the gaming subsystems than other CPUs. But this is only true in SMT and SMP (Symmetric Multi Threading and Processing) aware games.

If a game can only run on one core, then you are back to raw horse power. Intel has not overlooked that possibility though as the i7 has plenty of horse power to spare. As you can see from our limited testing above the i7 even at high resolutions is able to give an edge in many games due to it new design. We see almost a reversal of the Pentium 4 Vs the Athlon 64 days when AMD was able to do the same thing to Intel in most games.

{mospagebreak title=Power and Heat}
Power and Heat:
Power and Heat are the bane of most computer systems. If you are an enthusiast you might tell yourself you are willing to accept the extra power usage to gain those extra FPS, 3DMarks, etc. However, when the power bill arrives you might sing a different tune. Heat is the slow death of a system, the more heat your system produces the shorter its life often is. The i7 is supposed to have a decent TDP (130Watts for the i7-965) but does that equal a power savings when placed in a system? To find out we measured each of the test systems power draw from the wall under the following:
Idle
Gaming (Lost Planet DX10)
Lightwave rendering
Transcoding
HyperPi (100% CPU for extended periods)

	idle	gaming	render	transcoding	hyperpi
i7-965	185	284/302	232/293	249/274	193/306
i7-920	169	263/285	196/261	235/255	234/277
QX9770	165	230/255	209/253	235/245	245/252
Phenom 9850@2.6GHz	224	249/281	234/271	255/285	268/273
V8	208	347/378	388/413	331/359	365/397

Lowest Draw/Peak Draw

As you can see only the V8 system used more power under load than the top-end i7 965. The 920 did better but was still not under the draw of the QX9770 or the 9850. Only at idle did the i7 CPUs show a lower power draw.

The heat output of the i7 is a little more than I would have expected. I am not sure why but I had expected it to have less heat production that it did. The ThermalRight 120 Xtreme did a great job in keeping the 965 cool, but the stock HSF did not show what I would call stellar performance.

	idle	gaming	render	transcoding	hyperpi
i7-965	44/42/42/42c	57/53/55/59	70/71/70/68	68/71/66/67	70/70/71/67
i7-920	55/52/58/52c	76/75/79/70	77/76/78/89	77/74/73/79	79/77/79/87

{mospagebreak title=Value}
Value:
The Core i7 CPUs will fall into the same price lines as the existing Core 2 Quad CPUs. The i7 965 will hold the top slot at $999.00 the 940 will run $562.00 and the i7 920 will set you back $284. This is not too bad of a deal considering. However where you will take a hit in the wallet will be in purchasing an X58 board. The first generation of these will start out pricey to say the least and I would not expect them to drop anytime soon. Does this mean you should wait to get an i7? Not really, when looking at this upgrade it is important to remember that while you will spend about $100 more on a new “top-of-the-line” X58 board you will save a little on memory (DDR3 1066 is cheaper than DDR3 1600+)while the CPU should run about the same as what you would pay for a Core 2 Quad.  Existing HDDs GPU, PSUs and other components will still work (with the obvious exception of the HSF) I would not recommend using any current high speed DDR3, the risk of damage to the CPU is too much as many of these kits default to 1.8-1.9v and most boards will be set to auto right out of the box.  It is also important to remember when looking at the value of the i7 that even the entry level i7 920 out performs the top dog QX9770 in many cases. To wrap it up, the i7 will be an investment but one that is worth it based on performance per dollar.

{mospagebreak title=Conclusion}
Conclusion:
There is not much more to add to the i7, the performance really says it all. Intel has produced a true CPU evolution here, taking the Core marchitecture one step further and giving us a jump in performance. The fact that a single quad core CPU can in many cases perform as well or just behind a true Dual Socket 8 physical core system just by adding in one extra thread per core is impressive. The move to an internal memory controller designed for tri-channel DDR3 lends even more performance to the i7 system. There really was not a power savings to be seen over the older Core 2 but this may come with a die shrink to 32nm next year. The rumors and speculation that the i7 is not a gaming CPU have been dispelled in my mind. Even though gaming is highly GPU dependant, in only one game (Lost Planet) did I see the i7 truly lag behind the older Core 2 Quad. My guess is that Lost Planet, having been designed for a traditional Quad Core, did not like dealing with the extra thread per core and caused a performance loss. Application performance was nothing short of amazing as the i7 was able to render faster than a system with eight physical cores and lead the pack in everything but synthetic tests where the V8 remained out in front.
it would appear as if Intel has again launched another Conroe into the market and as I said when Conroe hit, AMD had better have something pretty amazing up their sleeve and be able to get it to market on time or they are in more trouble.  

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Tags: intel