Chip giant Intel launched the original Core i7 processors about seven months ago, so it’s about time the company rolled out some new models. Along with the mid-range Core i7-950 (3.06GHz), this month saw the debut of the flagship Core i7-975 Extreme Edition (3.33GHz). About the price of a small car, the Core i7-975 Extreme (around £728/$980) is by far the fastest processor on the planet. With faster multi-core technology, the chip lets hardcore users dominate.

But performance doesn’t stop at gaming. You’ll experience maximum performance for whatever you do, thanks to the combination of Intel’s Turbo Boost technology and Hyper-Threading technology. The downside is that cutting-edge performance comes at a price. What’s weird is that the new chip can currently be purchased a little cheaper than the ‘old’ Core i7-965 Extreme (from £733/$999). The Core i7-965 Extreme has a clock speed of 3.2GHz compared to the Core i7-975 Extreme’s 3.33GHz - a modest speed bump of 133MHz or 4% increase in performance. The rest of the features remain unchanged, including the higher- than-normal 150W TDP (thermal design power), which represents the maximum amount of power the cooling system in a computer is required to dissipate.

Nehalem (codename for Intel’s Core i7 microarchitecture, successor to the Core microarchitecture) is a radically new design for the company. Designed from the ground up to take advantage of 45nm technology, the Core i7 is Intel’s first ‘native’ quad-core processor - all four cores sit on the same piece of silicon. With its Core 2 CPUs, Intel used two dual-core dies to create a quad-core chip, which translates into better performance. Core 2 CPUs also feature Level 3 cache, something first seen on earlier Xeon server chips, but Core i7s feature up to a massive 8MB (shared between all four cores). Each of Nehalem’s four cores also have 256KB of lower-latency Level 2 cache.

Read the entire article at ITreviewed.