Intel Core i7

The latest upcoming Intel product, Core i7 is a brand the refers to the upcoming range of Intel's consumer 64-bit quad core CPUs with the x86-64 instruction set, based on the Intel Nehalem microarchitecture.

Intel Nehalem is the codename for a future processor microarchitecture being developed by Intel. Which will be marketed under the Core i7 brand-name.

Features:
- Simultaneous Multithreading (allows quad core chips to work on eight threads simultaneously.
- Two, four, or eight cores (731 million transistors for the quad core variant)
- 45nm manufacturing process
- Integrated memory controller supporting DDR3 SDRAM and between one and six memory channels
- Integrated graphics processor (IGP) located off-die, but in the same CPU package
- A new point-to-point processor interconnect, the Intel QuickPath Interconnect, replacing the legacy front side bus
- Simultaneos multithreading, which enables two threads per core.
- Native (monolithic, i.e. all processor cores on a single die) quad- and octo-core (8) processors
- Caches:
a) 32 KB L1 instruction and 32 KB L1 data cache per core
b) 256 KB L2 cache per core
c) 2-3 MB L3 cache per core shared by all cores
- 33% more in-flight micro-ops than Conroe
- Second-level branch predictor and second-level Translation Lookaside Buffer
- Modular blocks of components such as cores that can be added and subtracted for varying market segments

But Nehalem is about improving HPC, Database, and virtualization performance, and much less about gaming performance. ~From Anandtech

Release late 2008 for high-end desktop and dual-processor platforms and in Q3 2009 for mainstream desktop and mobile platforms.

Gallery: here