Getting to Know Intel’s New Core i7 Video Spotlight
Hi. This is Dave Altavilla for HotHardware. We have a special treat for you today, a new processor and desktop platform launch from the company affectionately known as Chipzilla. Now if you’ve been following our coverage of Intel’s new processor microarchitecture codenamed Nehalem, you’ll know that today marks the day of the Core i7 processor from Intel. This means new chipsets, new motherboards, a new LGA 1366 processor socket and a host of other new technologies to go with the platform. We’ve got Velocity micro Core i7 system here on the test bench as well as a few different Core i7 motherboards. We’re going to take you for a spin around Intel’s new Core i7 processor. Let’s have some fun and take a look.
As we mentioned earlier, Intel’s Core i7 processor architecture is a new design virtually from the ground up and there are several new key features including the chips, integrated memory controller where historically the memory controller resided on the chipset on the motherboard. This new integrated memory controller is a triple channel controller offering three times the memory bandwidth of the previous dual channel controller at DDR3 1066 memory speeds. Probably the most significant upgrade to Intel’s Core i7 processor is the new quick path interconnect which replaces Intel’s aging front side bus that exists on previous generation Intel processors.
This new 20-lane, bidirectional serial link provides communication to Intel’s I/O Hub and then fans out to PCIExpress. In the future, QPI will provide another link pair between multiple processors in high performance Intel Core i7 systems as well. In addition the new Core i7 brings back Intel’s hyper threading technology which provides two logical threads per processor core and up to 8 threads of available processing resources in a Quad Core processor. Now you can bet with all this new Intel processor and platform technology coming to market that OEMs and ODMs have been chopping it a bit to get their system ready for this launch. In house we have Velocity Micro’s Edge Z55 system that we’ll be looking at in detail on HotHardware.com in the coming weeks. This system is built on an Intel Core i7-920 processor. Let’s take a quick look.
Housed in Velocity Micro’s pure aluminum signature GX2-W chassis is an Intel Core i7-920 Quad Core processor with a stock speed of 2.66 GHz but Velocity Microchip did over clocking the factory of 2.93 GHz. The motherboard use is an Intel X58 chipset base Intel DX58SO motherboard. And of course because we have triple channel DDR3 system memory technology with the Core i7, we have a 6 Gig Corsair, triple channel memory kit installed, three 2 Gig dims are installed in this system.
And as you can see the system comes configured with a pair of AMD ATI Radeon, 4850 graphics cards in CrossFire mode. We should also note that with the X58 chipset for the Core i7, certain motherboard manufactures will be able to support NVIDIA’s multi-GPU SLI technology but it is dependent on the motherboard manufacturer and the motherboard BIOS to support it. Shifting gears quickly to components, one of the first motherboards we received in our labs is the MSI Eclipse Core i7 motherboard which is also built on the Intel X58 express chip set with ICH ten self bridge. This motherboard is outfitted with a multitude of the I/O options including eight USB 2.0 port, a pair of Gigabit Ethernet, LAN, ports, dual E-SATA ports and a FirWire port on its I/O plate.
The MSI eclipse comes eclipse with some pretty serious all-copper heatsinks on its chipset and power array. In addition it’s also updated with 6 DDR3 dim slots for total of up to 24 Gigs of DDR3 system memory. In addition, this board supports NVIDIA, dual GPU SLI configurations as well as dual AMD CrossFire configurations. The MSI Eclipse Plus version of the motherboard supports three-way SLI.
Next let’s take a look at the Core i7 in action. We’ve got Intel’s DX58 SO motherboard on our test bench, let’s fire it up and take a look at the system BIOS.
The Core i7 processor is built on a significantly different architecture versus Intel’s previous generation Core 2 processor. Here you can see a Core i7 965 Extreme processor clocked 3.2 GHz and a 132 MHz bus frequency. This is actually a little bit misleading but its not actually a bus per se but more of a reference clock to drive other clocks in the system likes the memory speed. Here you can see the QPI data rate or Quick Pass Interconnect clocked at 6.4 Giga transfers per second and our 8 Meg of L3 cache and 256K of L2 cache.
Now we’re sure you're wondering what overclocking is like with the new Core i7 processor and it certainly is different versus the Core 2 processor from Intel’s previous generation. Here you can see our host clock frequency of 133 MHz can be adjusted out very much like we bumped the front side bus speed on a Core 2 processor. Only with the Core i7, we’re also affecting this quick path interconnect data rate speed as well as the core clock of the processor and memory speeds all with this one reference clock. You can also adjust the processor’s multiplier. Only with the Core i7, the processor has four individual ratios for each of the four cores in the CPU and you can adjust one, two, theree or all four of them individually.
Next we’ll fire up a couple of benchmark and this is one of our favorites. It’s a multi-threaded 3D rendering benchmark called CineBench10. As you can see we’re fully taxing our 8 logical cores or 4 physical cores with hyperthreading in this benchmark at a 100% CPU utilization. The processor is taking 8 slices of this image and processing it simultaneously and as you can see we’re rounding up at just about 55, 56 seconds to process this task and we’ll come up with a score of right around 15,850 on this benchmark and actually if you compare that to a previous generation Core 2 QX9077 processor from Intel, also at 3.2 GHz we score about 12,500 so that’s a nice performance boost. Let’s take a look at some overclocking next.
Now as you can see we’re over clocking our Core i7 extreme 965 processor to a core speed of 4.150 GHz with a multiplier of 25X and that reference bus speed of 166 MHz. As you can see all 8 of our logical course are maxed out at 100% CPU utilization and we’re ripping through this test significantly faster than the stock speed test of 3.2 GHz of the processor. We’re going to come in about 11 seconds faster than the stock speed run with a score of 19,410, that’s pretty impressive overclocking results with the Core i7.
Now we expect the new Intel Core i7 processor to be shipping to retail sometime later this month. We hope you’ve enjoyed this quick take overview of the processor and some of the platform technologies that go with it. Make sure you stop by our site for the full performance evaluation, technical deep dive, pricing and other details because this simple quick video certainly can’t do justice for all the new technology that Intel is bringing to market. I’m Dave Antavilla for HotHardware. Thanks for stopping by.
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