Those big packages from Intel must have arrived at all the custom prebuilt computer sites, because all of a sudden they’re all making a racket about how their latest setups rock the new Core i7s like a hurricane:

• Dell has them in their XPS 730x starting today at $2K
• Alienware has them in the X-58 series starting at $1650 (or $3700, your choice)
• Gateway has them in the 6800 series starting at a suspiciously low $1250, considering how fancy the case is.

And of course they have all the other fixins as well.Keep in mind that Core i7 is not a magic bullet, though companies will try to tell you otherwise. It’s a fundamentally faster processor than the Core2, but a fast Core2 can still take on a slow Core i7, so check your hard hardware sites for the latest reviews before plunking down for a budget next-gen processor.

Lets look at the big picture here: MacWorld is in January, the Mac Pro’s are need for a CPU bump, and Intel is planning on releasing new Xeon server CPUs early next year. It sure looks good that the Mac Pro’s should receive a CPU upgrade soon but the question becomes, what CPU will Steve-O slap in the the Mac Pro? 

Chances are Apple will stick with the Xeon line up and the Core i7, or Nehalem, is the next logical step-up. Even though this upcoming CPU runs at comparable clock speeds as the current generation, benchmarks have soon a reasonable performance boost. Depending on the rest of MacWorld’s news, this might get pushed to a simple press release later on or it could be featured along with other Mac Pro upgrades – Blu-ray burner, anyone?

The next big thing in processors is hitting today — Intel’s Core i7, otherwise known as Nehalem, is finally hitting the ground. If you don’t know that it is, check out our past coverage. This first batch probably doesn’t have the processor you want to get (the more consumer-oriented ones be coming out a little later, good price comparison at the bottom of this page), but it’s a good preview of the performance we’ll all soon have in our desktops.

Check out the coverage at:
HardOCP
Tom’s Hardware
Anandtech
Tech Radar
Guru3D

Or your favorite hardware review site. I can’t wait to get one of these for my PC, and I’m hoping Apple is looking at making them available as well.

If that headline doesn’t get excited, may as well move on to the next story. Nothing to see here, folks! Except for a bad-ass processor that’s about to drop on November 17. If you’ve been following the Nehalem story, you know that it’s Intel’s microarchitecture “tock” to the 45nm process Penryn “tick.” You may have heard it referred to as “Core i7″ as well.

Basically, it means you’re going to be getting the most out of the silicon starting next month, or more likely early next year, since the ones coming out next month are super high-end, not really for end users like you and me. Still, it’s time to start checking under those cushions for spare nickels, because upgrade time cometh! [via Expreview and ZDNet]

Intel imagines a world with 15 Billion connected devices by 2015. As they see it, all that belongs to Atom, their mobile processor that already has over 700 design engagements. Stating that the “most profound technologies are the ones that disappear”, Pat Gelsinger Senior VP and GM of the Digital Enterprise Group for Intel set the tone for his IDF keynote speech with highlights from a future world of mobile computing.

Walking onto the stage through a mock front door, he demonstrated how embedded technology will integrate into our everyday lives. By demonstrating specific apps such as face recognition, a scene played out with the house welcoming him to the stage. In a humorous take on the ‘you got mail’ tagline, the ‘house’ offered that he had some two thousand audience members.

Further demonstrations highlighted how the Embedded Internet will eventually become ubiquitous. A BMW was on the stage to provide a demonstration of In-Vehicle Entertainment, with monitors installed in the head rests for back seat viewing. Using a 3D nav system from Planet 9 Studios, the audience was treated to a display showcasing how voice recognition could interact with the technology acting as a sort of virtual tour guide.

The next generation of Intel processors, Nehalem, features increased power management and improved virtualization. What they are calling Turbo Mode describes a process in which unused cores are detected and then turned off. Stemming from the simple concept of “shutting things off when they are not in use”, Turbo Mode distributes extra power to the cores that are in use. Calling the breakthrough “generational”, expect to see this utilized in future processors.

Intel’s “tick-tock” process of alternating between shrinking the die and updating the microarchitecture has done them well so far, and apparently they see no obstacles to continuing it through 2012. Unfortunately, that’s when things go a bit pear-shaped and you start having to deal with quantum properties (10nm is edge-of-comprehension small) and doing drastic things like stacking chips and carving canals into them.

The commentary is all in French, but you can smell what Intel’s got cooking if you go through the slides here at Canard Plus. I assume you either want all the details or don’t care at all, so I’ll let you read them yourself.
Image credit: Canard Plus

The next round of Intel processors have officially been named Intel Core. The very next round of processors, previously codenamed Nehalem, will go by the name Intel Core i7. As always, model numbers will be used to differentiate the different chips.

Yes, there will still be an Extreme Edition, which is the one on the right up there. Useful, perhaps, for those of you trying to play Crysis at decent speeds.

These chips should go into production in the fourth quarter of this year, with up to four cores of processing goodness.

via Boing Boing Gadgets

Those lucky bastards over at AnandTech got their mitts on a couple totally unofficial Nehalem chips. For those of you not in the know (a group which included me until about 15 minutes ago), Nehalem is the second part of the Intel processor cycle that started with the 45nm Penryn shrinkage all those months ago. Just as the Core microarchitecture (and the phenomenally popular Core2 Duos) were the second step of the 65nm shrinkage. The new architecture (and pinout) will show what 45nm can really do.

In the tests they did, the Nehalems annihilated their Penryn Core2 Quad Q9450. Even at artificially limited clock speeds and lacking the optimizations surely forthcoming, it trashed Intel’s current flagship like it was nothing. Media encoding, memory access speeds, 2D and 3D graphical tasks, everything was improved by huge margins. I’m pumped for this. I may actually have to overhaul my system.