Intel Core i7 and X58 revealed

Posted at: Wednesday 27th August 2008 by Clive Webster

Everything you need to know about Intel's next-generation Nehalem CPUs and X58 chipset, including hints about how it will overclock

NEW SOCKET

As a Nehalem CPU communicates directly with memory, it needs an additional bank of connections to the motherboard. The current Socket LGA775 doesn’t have enough pins to accomodate the memory controller, so Nehalem CPUs require the new Socket LGA1366 which has 1,366 connections to the motherboard rather than just 775. The two sockets are not compatible in any way, so you’ll need a new CPU cooler for Nehalem-based processors as well as a new motherboard.

Without a memory controller taking up space, the Northbridge of a Nehalem motherboard is much more streamlined than previous generations. The first Nehalem Northbridge will be Intel’s X58 Express, which provides 36 PCI-E 2.0 lanes for single 16-lane, dual 16-lane or quad 8-lane graphics setups. Both ATI’s CrossFire multi-graphics and Nvidia's SLI will work (although SLI support will be limited to certain approved boards).

HYPER-THREADING

The last big news about Nehalem is that it uses Hyper-Threading. This technology works just as it did with the Pentium 4, using spare resources of a processing core to try to execute a second process thread. This means that a quad-core Nehalem processor can accept and attempt to process eight threads simultaneously, making it even more massively parallel than the current Core 2 Quad CPUs.