Core i7 processor test results latest

Our latest lab tests on Intel’s first Core i7 processors, which launch officially today, show remarkable performance increases over the previous generation.

The top-of-the-range Core i7 965 Extreme Edition achieved a PCmark05 CPU score of 11,072 – 7.5 per cent higher than the previous highest non-overclocked score on an Intel QX9770 running at 3.2GHz.

The Cinebench X test, which measures multithreaded performance on multiple cores, showed a 29 per cent difference between the old and new generations: 16,202 compared with 12,544 (see PDF download).

Some online figures show greater differences, but many of these were tested on an Intel motherboard using the company’s X25-M solid-state disk, which has read speeds of 200Mbits/sec and write speeds of 70Mbits/sec. We used an Asus board to compare the i7 and the Qx9770 on a similar platform.

The Core i7 chips are part of the Nehalem platform, involving what Intel describes as the biggest architecture change in a decade. It includes the new x58 chipset.

A major break with previous generations is that the memory controller is on the central processor instead of on the separate Northbridge chip. This avoids the bottleneck of the connecting front-side bus (FSB), which is superseded by a new fast interconnect called Quickpath.

The arrangement is similar to one that gave AMD the edge over Intel when it launched the Athlon.

Core i7 also introduces the SSE4.4 extension to the instruction set to boost multimedia processing.

The three initial versions of the i7 are the 3.2GHz Core i7-965 EE, the 2.93GHz Core i7-940, and the 2.66GHz Core-i7 920, costing respectively $999 (£600), $562, and $284 in bulk.

AMD plans a quad-core chip, codenamed Shanghai, which, like Nehalem, uses a 45nm manufacturing process.

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