Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Intel gives Nehalem its official name: Core i7

Intel has formally confirmed that its upcoming line of Nehalem processors will fit under the Intel Core branding scheme, following several weeks of speculation about what processors based on the new microarchitecture would be called.

What's interesting though is the choice of suffix Intel will use with the new chips; instead of opting for the natural successor to Core 2, Core 3, Intel will oddly use the "i7" suffix.

The statement issued by Intel says that "this is the first of several new identifiers to come as different products launch over the next year," before going onto point out that the brand logo will be available for high performance desktop PCs. This leads us to believe that the mobile and low-end desktop processors may carry a different suffix—or indeed brand—from the high-end products.

The new logo looks quite a bit different to the older Core 2 design, as the white background behind the Intel logo has disappeared. The new Core i7 logo is made up of several different shades of blue, while there will be a separate black logo reserved for Intel's Extreme Edition processors – all wording on both badges will be in white.

Finally, despite the hint that there may be more brands being unveiled for low-end and mobile processor products, Intel confirmed that processors will still continue to be differentiated by model numbers.

The first Core i7-based products expected to be released in the fourth quarter of this year will be Intel's first native quad-core processors and will signal the comeback for Intel Hyper-Threading Technology following its absence from the original Core microarchitecture. This will enable the chips to handle up to eight software threads on the four physical processing cores.

What do you think of Intel's new branding scheme for Nehalem? Share your thoughts in the forums.

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