When Intel announced its latest series of processors last year everybody was looking over to AMD… Will AMD put up a fight and show something that will ruin Intel’s leadership? Succeeding the popular Core 2 Duo series this series will be called Core i7 with a brand name Nehalem, Intel was widening the technology barrier with competitor. Now when AMD has lost the lead the market status of Intel is increasing continuously.

Instead of naming the processors in MHz like AMD, Intel chose to name their new processor by the name Core 2 Duo which was pretty easy to understand. As a result of this the processor got more popularity than expected. Intel is carrying on the same process. Now the company decided to name the product Core i7 which is also easy to understand. Intel announced that there will be two series, one with simple Core i7 logo which is for high end computing. While the one with black Core i7 logo will be for extreme edition.

  Nehalem processors are totally based on new architecture. So that’s why Intel named them Core i7 instead of Core 3. Intel didn’t specify exactly why they choose the name i7. Intel representative told that the name is not after some technical specifications, it is just a simple name chosen after market research. The company expects the name i7 to get popular within a few months after entering the market (and Windows 7 is coming this summer as well!)

The Core i7 processor is a native quad core processor. Besides the fact that they draw less power, these processors are much more efficient than the current processors. This processor is much faster and efficient as compared to AMD’s latest processor, including Phenom II and Phenom II T (the DDR3 version for AM3 socket). Also this processor is a competitor to Intel’s Core 2 Duo and quad, which will move to low end of offer.

The Nehalem processor requires a completely different platform. It requires the latest motherboard from Intel that is X58 which is quite expensive which has LGA socket-1366 and Tri- Channel memory. This motherboard runs DDR3 memory which is also not so cheap. Also this processor requires a cooler to keep its temperature down. The Nehalem processor will lie in the price band of $316 (for 2.66GHz) and $999 for Extreme series part (around 3.2GHz). Also cost of DDR3 is not coming down so quickly, but is already at level of fastest DDR2… But imagine having 12 or even 24 GB of memory on your computer! Whoa! Disable the swap drive right away!

The Nehalem processor is able to provide such a performance because of both L2 and L3 cache memories are there with integrated quad processors and integrated memory controller. This has advantage over previous processors as it has L3 cache which was not there in previous processors. These all features make the Core i7 processor much faster and efficient. Also the processor has a very good performance in overclocking. It easily over clocks to much higher frequency and one can obtain great over clocking results by using various cooling methods.

But there might be some hurdles in the pathway. As a long time is be given to the people to switch to the socket which is required by the processor. But as many other manufacturers will start making the boards with the LGA socket then it will get going. Intel has estimated that people might not be able to switch to Core i7 in 2009 due to the motherboard requirements, but estimate that things will change in the coming year…

So, judging from what we saw in February (AMD showed off a 6-core server cpu), Intel has no problems, and can continue to sell great in all market segments (and recession is shifting average price of CPU down!)…