It's a new year, and a new processor generation is making its presence felt. Three of the new Core i7 CPUs from Intel (codename Bloomfield) have already passed through the CHIP Test Center and will also be available in markets by the turn of the year. With the first new products based on the Nehalem platform, everything is different: Intel has improved upon the Core 2 architecture and now the standard is quad-core chips, which thanks to the return of Hyper-Threading, can appear as eight virtual CPUs to the operating system.



Even the Socket 775 CPU interface will pass into history-making way for LGA 1366, which will support the Core i7s. That will obviously call for a new motherboard: Intel's new (and currently only) chipset for Nehalem is 'Called the X58, and it supports only DdR3 memory for now-DDR2 has had its day. The next thing to go out the window is the Frontside Bus (FSB), which has become a bottleneck for recent CPUs. Nehalem chips have three memory channels, using which the memory controllers address the DDR3 modules. Also new: the memory controllers are integrated in the chip and not part of the Northbridge on the mainboard anymore.