KEY POINTS:
The elves at Intel must've been extra busy, as they've managed to crank out a whole brand-spanking new line of totally re-designed CPUs.
Because CPUs are essentially the engine powering your PC, any new releases are potentially huge news, and I'm pleased to report that Intel's latest bit of silicon goodness, code-named Nehalem (but officially called Intel Core i7), is very massive news indeed, sporting serious speed to burn - and then some.
Much of Nelalem's performance increases are to do with some fairly fundamental changes to its innards, the biggest of which has seen Intel moving the memory controller off the motherboard and onto the CPU itself.
In a nutshell, doing this vastly improves the speed with which your PC's memory can be accessed by the CPU.
If an old wives tale has it that two heads are better than one, having four must be unbelievable. This old proverb definitely rang true with the review Nehalem I was sent, which packed four cores (each is essentially a separate processor, able to process information independently, making for way faster multi-tasking).
Where previous Intel quad core CPUs consisted of two separate dual core processors, Nehalem squeezes them onto the same chip. In non-geek speak, this means that communications between all four cores is way speedier, which with the return of Hyper-Threading (which allows each core to in turn run multiple sub-tasks) makes running demanding apps a significantly smoother affair.
All this tweaking under Nehalem's hood does however comes at a price, albeit a small one. This takes the form of a redesigned CPU socket which is incompatible with earlier Intel CPU sockets.
If you're shopping for a whole new PC, this isn't going to be an issue, but upgraders will need to factor a new motherboard and RAM into their budgets.
Performance
The review Nehalem processor I was sent clocked in at a fairly zippy 3.2GHz. If it were a car, the Nehalem would have so much raw horsepower that Jeremy Clarkson would probably experience a spontaneous trouser accident. Some fearless geeks have already managed to overclock it to a positively searing 4.05GHz - this would leave Clarkson very red-faced, not to mention brown-jockeyed.
Benchmarking-wise, the single Nehalem powered motherboard came pretty close to wiping the floor with the SkullTrail motherboard which was powered by two 3.2GHz Core 2 Quad QX9770 CPUs.
Putting the Core i7 through its paces with Sisoft Sandra's benchmarking application saw it score an astonishing 102530, which is only marginally slower than the 116498 scored by the Skulltrail.
Considering that that the Nehelem's score was achieved with only half the processor cores of the Skulltrail, this is very impressive indeed.
In real world use, the Nehalem cut through CPU intensive tasks such as re-encoding video like a knife through hot butter, barely breaking a sweat in the process.
Conclusion
Intel's previous Core 2 Quad QX9770 CPU I tested with the SkullTrail seemed fast, but Nehalem is a whole new box of fluffy dice.
This is great news for the next crop of notebook and desktop PCs due to drop in 2009 as Nehalem's clever modular design means that Intel can use the same CPU designs for desktop PCs, servers and notebook PCs.
Whilst Nehalem may need a new motherboard and new memory, it's a must have for power users wanting to wring every last bit of speed out of their PC. Now the wait for a dual Nehalem-powered SkullTrail-like motherboard begins.
