Core 2 is dead, long live Core i7

Posted at: 10:09am 11th August 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

Intel officially announces the new name for its Nehalem CPUs, and explains that i7 is an identifier

Just as we reported in Rumour Control last week, Intel has today announced that its first Nehalem processors will be officially called Core i7, although the naming strategy isn’t quite as simple as we first thought.

In a similar way to when Intel dropped the number from the end of the names of its Pentium chips, the company is now dropping ‘Core 2’ in favour of ‘Core’ as a general name for its CPUs. The name Core will then be followed by an ‘identifier’ which, in the case of the first Nehalem CPUs is i7.

However, Intel says that ‘This is the first of several new identifiers to come as different products launch over the next year,’ so we’re going to be seeing a few different Core names in the near future. Intel has also officially launched the Core i7 logos, with a blue badge for standard desktop chips and a black coat of arms for the high-end Extreme Edition processor based on the Nehalem architecture. On top of the new name, Intel says it’s going to stick with its system of model numbers to differentiate between the chips as well.

As well as being Intel’s first desktop CPU architecture with an integrated memory controller, the Core i7 CPUs will also bring back the Hyper-Threading technology first found in Intel’s Pentium 4 and Xeon CPUs, where a CPU’s resources can be split between two threads to enable multi-threading on one core. Intel was originally planning to relaunch this as Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT), but it’s now decided to stick with the old Hyper-Threading moniker after all. The introduction of Hyper-Threading will effectively mean that a quad-core CPU can handle eight threads simultaneously.


Te read all about the new processor, the new motherboards it requires and how to overclock it, please click here