The fastest CPU on the plan¬.1 et, the QX 9770, is in severe danger. It faces competition; but not from the expected quarter i.e. AMD. Shockingly, Intel is doing to itself what they did to AMD two years ago with their Core 2 Duos. They promised a new CPU architecture every two years and true to their promise we got a large, inconspicuous looking par¬cel from Intel, USA. Opening it we were surprised to find a large black motherboard called the DX 58S0, nicknamed "SmackOver"; obviously based on their X58 chip¬set. Also in the bundle was a rather large CPU, clearly larger than any LGA 775 Cpu. We also found a set of three 1-GB DDR3 1066 sticks. Now Nehalem supports tri-channel DDR3, so by now we were rubbing our hands in glee. Rummaging deep into the carton we unpacked a small box that contained an 80 GB Solid State Drive that runs offa SATA 2.0 interface.

Setting up the kit, we had a quick look at the DX 58S0s BIOS which was laden with over¬clocking features and all sorts of settings; enough to keep even hardcore overclockers exuber¬ant. Interestingly the Nehalem runs off a 133 MHz FSB, while all Penryn CPUs use a faster 333 MHz bus. Thus the multiplier for these CPUs is very high. We found we had the Core i7 Extreme 965, which is a 3.2 GHz part and the top-of-the-line Nehalem processor - oh joy! There was no way to set the multiplier to run at 24x fixed. An option to turn on Turbo Mode promised to freeze the multiplier to any maximum value specified (in this case 24x) but this didn't work and the multiplier shuffled between 12x and 24x throughout our tests.

The reason for Nehalem hav¬ing a slower bus is that the CPU itself now has the memory con¬troller integrated on its die; a first for Intel. Therefore a very fast bus is no longer needed to communi¬cate with the Northbridge, which traditionally incorporated the memory controller for Intel-based systems. Nehalem should now (at least theoretically) enjoy very low latency access to memory result¬ing in improved memory utilisa¬tion, something which AMD has excelled at since their memory controllers became part of their CPU dies. This in itself is the big¬gest change and something that makes Nehalem totally different from the Core 2 architecture and something that was missing from Intel's repertoire for awhile now.

Owing to this shift, all Nehalem CPUs are built around a colossal 1366 LGA socket, a huge hike in number of contacts from LGA 775. Nehalem also features an old trick from Intel - Hyper-threading; which hasn't been around since the third generation of Pentium 4 processor. Nehalem is available as dual- and quad-eore configura¬tions, which means four or eight hyper threaded cores. True to this Windows XP shows the i7 Extreme 965 as having eight cores.Besides this Nehalem uses L3 cache, previously unheard of on desktop CPUs except for Intel's Extreme Edition Pentium 4s of old.

This L3 cache is shared between cores, much like Core 3 Duo pro¬cessors share their L2 cache. The L2 cache on Nehalem CPUs is now discrete per core; and each core gets 256 KB of dedicated L2 cache. The L3 cache is a whopping 8 MB, though still not as much as the 12 MB L2 caches on the Yorkfield pro¬cessors. Nehalem is still not native¬ly quad core. Due to the fact that the i7 has an integrated memory controller its external bus oper¬ates on a HT-like link at 6.4 GBps. This in itself means the numbers are incomparable to earlier Intel CPUs including the Wolf dale and Yorkfield processors.

We tested the Nehalem kit with the supplied DX 58 SO moth¬erboard, 1 x 3 GB DIMMs of DDR3 1066 MHz memory, Intel's 80 GB SSD and ASUS' GTX 280. Although a fair comparison isn't possible since we used a number of differ¬ent components on our CPU test bench we did a few comparisons. The memory on the Nehalem sys¬tem was running at 1066 MHz at timings of 7-7-7-20, which is pos¬sibly slower than DDR2 800 MHz at 4-4+12; which means the QX 9770 has somewhat of an unfair advan¬tage. Of course with read speeds in the region of 260 MBjs, SSD is a solid advantage for the new¬comer, so we're calling it about even. With identically clocked core speeds both these CPUs slugged it out, but Nehalem seems to have a trick too many for the QX 9770 which gives up in despair.

Only in UT 3 did we see a curious 62 fps drop- this has got to be a glitch with the game on this platform and updates from either Intel or Epic Games are sure to remedy this. The only other benchmark to favour the older QX 9770 is the multi-eore benchmark in POVRay 3.7, where the i7 965 is some 3.5 seconds slower in completing the scene, this may be attributed to the overhead involved in hyper threading, because in the single core render test Nehalem is faster.

What was shocking was the dif¬ference HT made under wPrime; it's a whole 60 per cent faster; Nehalem chalks up 8.503 seconds, something a Core 2 Quad wouldn't do even at 4 GHz, and something most dual cores cannot dream of even at beyond 5 GHz! Likewise all applications show a healthy performance gain, WinRAR being the biggest beneficiary to the new¬comers ego with a super 91 per cent increment in compressionj decompression performance. The best thing is that this is a review kit, with initial BIOS updates and drivers; as the platform matures the i 7 will get a lot faster. Faster DDR3 memory will also help. If that wasn't enough the top-end i7 Extreme 965 is expected to cost around Rs 55,000, which makes it cheaper than the QX 9770.