Intel Core i7 Speeds Make Big Waves

As Jesse James mentioned, it's a light day at Homotron - Den Den and he are out saving the world, and I'm taking a birthday spa with Elizabeth Dole, Elizabeth Hasselbeck, and Elizabeth Cheney (I call it 'Republican Bitch Soup').

But in the meantime: Intel's new Core i7 chips are loose in the wild, and some of the tests they're undergoing have turned up amazing numbers. "Historic" numbers, in fact.

The 3.2GHz Core i7 Extreme and its X58 mainboard appear to have surpassed Intel's own Xeon processors, while Geekbench for Windows scored the quad-core i7 at 7998, a whopping 7.7% faster than Xeon.

Those gains become monstrous when weighed against mainstream parts, such as the 32.5% increase in speed over an equivalent Core 2 Extreme.

It's the new internal architecture that's responsible for the jump in processing power - cutting the legacy system bus for QuickPath, a point-to-point design that allows the processor to communicate much more directly with memory as well as peripherals. This also ratchets up memory bandwidth, reduces round-trip latency, and introduces three memory channels, which can theoretically boost speed.

We'll see these Core i7 desktop processors sometime in the middle of November.

Public Core i7 tests show "historic" speed [Electronista]