Since its arrival a little over 2 years ago now the Core 2 series has dominated the CPU market. The success of the Core 2 processors is largely due to its impressive performance and amazing overclocking abilities, while the competitive pricing certainly helped seal the deal. Since the release of the original Core 2 Duo processors, which included the E6700, E6600, E6400, and E6300, the series has become even more impressive, with the introduction of the cooler, quieter, and faster 45nm Wolfdale architecture.

Although the Core 2 processors continued to impress, as they became faster and cheaper, the prospect of something bigger and better has been on the horizon for quite some time now. Given how impressive the Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad processors have been, we could not help but wonder what would supersede them. For some time we had been anticipating the architecture codenamed “Nehalem”, which was later revealed to be the new Core i7 series.

So far Intel has announced just three new Core i7 processors, which simply go by the model numbers 965, 940, and 920. The 965 is an Extreme Edition processor which is said to cost an estimated $1410 US, while the 940 is roughly half as expensive at $720 US, and the 920 costs just $370 US. Really, in many ways all three processors are very similar, though I doubt this surprises most of you given Intel’s history with their Extreme Edition processors.

The Core i7 940 and 920 processors come clocked at 2.93GHz and 2.66GHz respectively, while they both boast a 256KB L2 cache along with an 8MB shared L3 cache. The L3 cache is shared among the four cores, and it is worth mentioning that so far all three Core i7 processors are quad-core parts. However, these new processors will support 8-threads simultaneously thanks to the implementation of Hyper-Threading technology.

Furthermore, the on-die memory controller supports triple-channel DDR3-800/1066 memory, while the QuickPath interface of the 940 and 920 processors supports a throughput of 4.8 GT/s. This means that the Core i7 processors will have a peak memory bandwidth of 32GB/s at their disposal and, unlike the Core 2 processors, they are designed to be able to use it. When you think about it 32GB/s is a staggering throughput, especially when considering that a Core 2 processor using the 333MHz FSB was limited to a little less than 11GB/s.

Now the much more expensive Core i7 965 Extreme Edition processor features the same amount of L2/L3 cache, along with the same memory support. Where it differs is in its clock frequency of 3.20GHz, while the QuickPath interface throughput has been boosted to 6.4 GB/s. How much faster this will make the Extreme Edition processor is yet to be seen. The Core i7 is very different to existing Core 2 processors in many ways, so before we dive into the results, let’s just take a moment to look at what has changed...