Intel Core i7 975 CPU

Intel Core i7 975 CPU

Intel released their Core i7 family late last year. At the time there were three models, the Core i7 920, the Core i7 940 and the Core i7 965 Extreme Edition. Intel CPUs have long been known for their high performance relative to the competition and are at the leading edge in terms of process technology, transistors on the die and features. Their main competition for the CPU market, AMD, has lagged behind in performance and has had to compete in the price/performance category to even stay in the game.

Intel is launching their second series of Core i7 processors in the form of the Core i7 950 and Core i7 975 which is the fastest available Intel CPU on the market today at 3.33GHz. This processor uses the same core features and design as the previous Core i7 CPUs taking up the $999 spot on their lineup previously taken up by the Core i7 965 Extreme Edition. With unlocked multipliers and the ability to overclock automatically, it should be an interesting ride in the least.

Intel manufactures their Core i7 series on a 45nm process at their Fabs. The Core i7 CPU has 731 million transistors on a die 263mm2 in size. The transistor count and die size is the same for all Core i7 CPUs from the 975 to the 920. These are the first true quad core CPUs from Intel, with previous Intel Core 2 Quad CPUs having two processor cores on each of two packages on the same processor.

Each core on the Core i7 975XE has 32KB of L1 Data and 32KB of L1 Instruction cache, bringing the total to 256KB for all four cores. Level 2 Cache is 256KB per core bringing the total to 1MB on the Nehelam core. Intel's Core i7 processors have a shared “Smart Cache” of 8MB that feeds all four cores on the processor. The Core i7 family has HyperThreading which allows the CPU to work on two software threads at a time, effectively doubling the number of cores. A Core i7 can work on 8 threads.

One major change with the Core i7 is the memory controller has moved to the processor rather than the motherboard's Southbridge as on previous Intel CPUs. The memory controller on the CPU now supports Triple-Channel memory, which allows the Core i7 to have increased memory bandwidth over similarly clocked dual-channel memory. The maximum bandwidth on DDR3-1333MHz in Triple Channel mode is 25GB/second.

source:http://www.motherboards.org