At their developers forum in San Francisco Intel released details of their new processor that will form the basis of their new products from next year onwards.  With the official name of Core i7 the chips will begin to appear in laptops, desktops and servers during 2009.  We have become fairly used the never ending performance increases implied by Moore’s law when talking about new processors, so what is new or different about the Core i7 processor?

Performance and energy efficiency

Intel are trying to both increase performance and reduce power consumption at the same time. This is a neat trick if it can be managed as usually there is a trade off between one or the other. Intel will increase performance through putting more multiple processing cores on a single chip while at the same time increasing the memory to processor performance by removing the FSB bottleneck (which is something AMD have done for a while). At the same time the processor will reduce energy requirements by having the ability to turn off any processing cores on the chip that are not actually being used.

In the meantime

Of course in the meantime the world continues to turn, so if you are looking for an new processor you could do worse than look at the popular and highly rated Intel Core 2 Duo Quad Q6600 Processor. As time goes on more applications exist to take advantage of the Quad and this processor would be ideal for someone that needs good multi-tasking performance.