Nehalems begin rolling out - Core i7 is just the start

SO THE INITIAL desktop Nehalem became Core i7. It is a bit of a surprise - something like "Core 3" fit the purpose better if you ask this writer. What could be the root of this new name?

The seventh generation of a CPU family has always been a watershed for Intel. A decade ago, when P6 was Pentium Pro, P7 was supposed to be "Merced" later known as the infamous Itanium.

We all know that Itanium didn't exactly prove to be a replacement or successor to the X86 nor will it ever be. In the meantime, the wayward uberclocked offspring called Pentium 4, or internally coded as P68, was also, with the advent of Core family, pushed into history. As the Core is architecturally a continuation of the Pentium Pro and Pentium III line, they could - in a very vague way - also be sorted under the P6 grouping.

So, if Itanium was out of the P7 moniker race, and the Prescott P68 progeny had no further offspring, the upcoming "quantum leap forward" Nehalem could take the seventh-generation symbol for itself: i7 then is just another way of saying P7.

At any rate, it looks like the part is finally ready for launch. No, not at the upcoming IDF this week we think, but by the end of September.

Both "Bloomfield ", now Core i7, and "Gainestown" DP workstation "Xeon letter-numeral" parts are ready. The 3.2 GHz top launch speed bins still leave plenty of speed headroom even at the current steppings, providing at least 15 per cent - 20 per cent overclock potential even with air cooling.

Remember that the Nehalem pipeline design and vastly relaxed cache timings should allow higher top speeds compared to even the E-0 stepping of the current Penryn part.

We may have to wait for subsequent Nehalem steppings to enjoy that - it's to be expected with a brand new architecture anyway. We expect stable Bloomfield clocks in the last stepping prior to the 32nm jump to go as high as 4.5GHz. You may need a power drive like the one on Asus Rampage Extreme mobo to feed that Core i7 properly.

And if they don't get that far by mid next year? Shame on them then - go back to the drawing board and reduce those latencies, hehe.

Are we going to see the Core i7, at least the extreme edition part, launched by the end of this quarter? Quite possibly. By the end of October latest? Very likely we hear. That latter time-frame would apply to the DP Gainestown too.

We're looking forward to see who'll be the first to have an overclockable top-bin DP board here. Not only the performance gains will be improved, but the design job will be far easier than with Skulltrail. For a start, no ugly FB-DIMMs: the memory is the same DDR3 on both UP and DP mobos, just double the channels on the latter ones. µ