Intel Core i7 processors (Nehalem)
Core i7, that’s the name of the new family of processors (code name Nehalem) Intel is releasing this month. I couldn’t read about something as major as this and not blog about it although I am having my midterms now. Anyway the new family has some big changes in the architecture something Intel calls QuickPath which is a new way of handling shared memory and inter-processors communication. The keyword is NO MORE FRONT SIDE BUS. FSB was used as parallel way for accessing both the memory and the IO devices. The new architecture separates the IO and the memory connections, putting the memory in direct point to point connection and that means that the memory manager moved from the chipset into the processor. The IO is handled through the chipset on the motherboard. That means with those new processors come new motherboards, chipsets and everything. One of the restrictions that comes with the new package is that although they support to have more DIMMs but the support only DDR3 (bye bye DDR...