Introduction:

Literally, Intel Inside!

   Another evolutionary step is upon us as retailers continue stocking their shelves with Intel's latest Core I7 Processor even with the award winning Core 2 series still found in very large numbers around retailers. Unless you're living several hundred miles from civilization without any form of media, you have probably already heard about the processor and learned that it doesn't out perform its older cousin when it comes to video games. Why, might you ask, would Intel do this? Well here's your answer.

A few years ago, a company named AMD came along with a revolutionary CPU design and designed their memory controller on-die. This gave the X2 desktop generation a noticeable performance increase over Intel's best processors at the time. Naturally, AMD continued to flourish and took over 50% of the desktop market. To make matters worse, AMD released their server class Opteron processors which became the CPU of choice for the IT market.

Well, this caused great concern for Intel who gathered some of the best minds in the silicone world for some serious discussion on what they needed to do next to regain the desktop market. After looking over what concepts showed the most promise, they rediscovered their passion and fired out some concepts. By shortening BUS paths, developing new chipsets, and giving the processor core a whole new set of biceps, Conroe was born which launched the Core 2 series. We've seen similar processors since that have further driven Intel's market share even higher.

Of course, all the while Conroe was near completion, another group was already well under way looking to pull off one hell of a "hat trick", so to speak, of regaining ground or out right retaking the server market. Engineers began developing a newer processor core with an integrated memory controller that could rival AMD's. This is where I7 comes in to play. Rather than looking to match or moderately outperform AMD's Dual Channel performance that made the Opteron CPU the optimal server choice, Intel wanted to offer something far more aggressive and better tuned for moving bandwidth; a memory controller capable of supporting Dual and Triple Channel memory.

If you read my latest Triple Channel review offered by Patriot Memory, then you noticed that the I7 does an exceptional job of providing memory bandwidth thanks to the integrated memory controller. The new i7 system can match AMD's Dual Channel performance using a single memory module which would be single channel mode. Performance doesn't stop there. The new system completely surpasses AMD's performance in dual and, especially, triple channel configurations. What this means for server platforms is future server grade processors will have roughly 20 to 30 GB/s and higher memory bandwidth to feed processor execution. And anyone in the IT field knows that when it comes to servers, it's all about the I/O execution.

Take the I7 Quad Core processor for example. It has 8 processing threads, or Hyper-Threads. That means you have an I7 doing the job of eight processors even though it's only a quad core. Server processors are going to offer even more Hyper-Threads which should equate in to even more executions. Picture, if you will, a processor offering 8, 16, or even 32 multi-threaded executions at once and you'll have an idea of what I'm talking about.

Hopefully, you now have an idea of the purpose of the new I7 platform. It's not really here to push video game frame rates any higher. At least, not just yet. The Core 2 series does the same job quite well which is why you haven't seen any frame rate improvements within the I7 on the new game titles available. However, there are a couple games with multi-thread support that have seen as much as a 40% increase in frame rates versus the Core 2. But, what's another 30 frames when you already have 100 frames using the highest settings possible?

With that said, lets get to the two fold purpose. Here, I have Intel's latest DX58SO "Smackover" Motherboard coupled with the i7 Quad Core Extreme 965 Processor. In order to keep things simple and cover each component in ways you can easily understand, let's check out the features. Here are the new features and benefits that actually update the X58 Chipset.

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