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Faster memory access

The reason for this platform shift has to do in part with a fundamental design change in Intel's CPU architecture. As has long been rumored, Intel has finally adopted an integrated memory controller into its Core i7 CPUs. What this means is that instead of the CPU communicating with a separate controller on the motherboard before it can talk to the system memory, Core i7 can save a step and essentially receive data from the system RAM directly.

Intel's new Extreme Motherboard DX58SO.

AMD adopted this integrated controller strategy in the early days of its Athlon dual-core processors, and it was one of the factors that led the chipmaker to dominate the competing Intel Pentium D CPUs of that generation. Through superior design since then, Intel has regained its performance lead over AMD and we suspect that by adding the on-chip memory controller to Core i7, Intel has only made it more difficult for AMD to find a design advantage moving forward.

A potential complication here is that the new memory controller has three channels to the RAM. That means that unlike most desktop setups, which involve two or four memory sticks, Core i7 systems will want memory sticks in multiples of three. Hence, why Intel shipped our test system with only 3GB of RAM (we got creative with a 2x1GB, 1x2GB RAM configuration, for 4GB total for testing), and why in high-end PCs that use the new X58 platform, 3GB, 6GB, and 12GB configurations will be common. X58 will also support only DDR3 RAM whose prices have thankfully come down over the past year.

Four cores, sometimes eight

If you've followed Intel's chips designs over the years, the term "HyperThreading" shouldn't be unfamiliar. This technology lets Intel simulate more processing threads on top of its old dual-core Pentium 4 chips. It abandoned that strategy with the Core 2 family, but Intel has resurrected it with Core i7, and it's why you'll see eight processing threads when you bring up Windows' system performance screen. Few day-to-day programs will benefit from HyperThreading, and it's more of a situational benefit for processing reliability and the scant few applications that can actually support so many threads. Core i7 will eventually hit eight native cores on a single CPU, or 16 processing streams with HyperThreading, but Intel has not made it clear when that will happen. It may be worth the wait, if you know you'll need that much parallelism, but few consumers will.

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