Don't the VIA chips get around 800 MB/s? It's not as high as these CPU's, but for a single core it puts them to shame.

Sandra isn't even a real benchmark. It's like comparing superpi... pure maths when processors rarely do pure maths. Admittedly the article isn't clear regarding which setups are being compared exactly. However, Core 2 Quad has a lot of life left in it, that's one thing im sure we can all agree on. My next upgrade will be a Q9650 to replace me E8400, and then I'm not upgrading again until Core i7 8-cores are released with pricing that doesn't require one to blackmarket some organs.

Sandra benchmark, in my opinion, shows nothing. Only real world applications matter.

Nova - thanks for clearing it up.

Though I still don't see how it is an 'outstrip' by more than 10%, as the author suggests (if looking at the green and red points)... I see ~30/1100 on crypto (or <3 ).

Sandra is NOT a good benchmarking tool. I also find it very funny that Intel's only competition is it's self. I love that people hate Intel so much.

Guys,the benchmark is apples-to-apples, i.e. two 4-core "Penryn" Harpertown Xeon X5482 vs two 4-core "Nehalem-EP" Gainestown Xeon W5580, the red point. So, 8 physical vs 8 physical cores, and you can see 3.2 GHz X5482 outsrips the W5580 pair (once HT is on in W5580 the situation gets even worse as you can see on another point).

When you say the i7 gets beats by more than 10% over the previous generation... I think the blue data point is a dual socket setup with 6 cores per socket (which would not be that surprising against a dual socket **quad** core i7)

I don't think most readers would be surprised to see a dual socket hexacore setup beat a dual core quadcore setup even with the architecture differences.

Could you, or another kind reader, clarify if I'm reading this correctly? (Thanks)

2x core 2 quads have 8 PHYSICAL cores.
Nehalem chips have 4 physical and 4 virtual - they will never match the performance of 8 physical cores, and the fact that they perform so well compared to their older siblings is a testament to how well the SMT is performing on core i7. Wait until the 8 core variants of Nehalem arrive, and simply test without SMT enabled, to make it a fair(er) comparison.

Core 2 cores are smaller than Nehalem cores too. I would expect a 32 nm Core 2 variant to be pretty small.

MY Cpu is sooo much better than i7 HAHAHA.
I can't wait to do some cryptography!!!!!!

Core2 has lots of life left in it. I wonder if intel is brave enough to bring core2 onto 32nm and 2xnm. Something tells me intel might have to compete with itself. Low clocked/volted core2 solo and duo would spruce up the netbook market so that they are actually useable for something more then sending an email.

shouldn't that X7640 rather be called X7460, the old hexacore of the Core2 line?