The implications of this move are huge as it means that you could build a gaming PC around X58 and Bloomfield without having to worry about the type of graphics card you plan to run in 2009 or 2010. It also means that the hateful nForce 200 PCI Express chip is unlikely to make an appearance on many motherboards as X58 supports PCI Express (PCIe) in 2 x 16 or 4 x 8 configuration. If you’re desperate for Tri-SLI with 3 x 16 PCIe 2.0, you will need the extra chip but the majority of gamers can expect their motherboard choice to become simpler.
Intel's X50 chipset schematic
They can also expect the motherboard to use less extensive – and less expensive – cooling as X58 is essentially X48 without the memory controller, although it has a QPI link to the CPU. The new chipset has less work to do than before and doesn’t require a heat spreader and as an added benefit your overclocking efforts are likely to leave the chipset voltage unchanged. Hurrah for common sense.
The first three members of the Core i7 family to go on sale are LGA1366 Bloomfield CPUs. The Core i7 920 runs at 2.66GHz and sells for $284 in batches of 1000, which currently means a UK price of £270. The Core i7 940 is clocked at 2.93GHz and sells for $562, which is a steep £493 retail over here.
The fastest Bloomfield is Core i7 965 Extreme, which has a clock speed of 3.2GHz and the usual Extreme price of $999. This would usually equate to £650, however we are seeing it on the web at £881. Holy Mother of !*?!!!
The 920 and 940 have a QPI bandwidth of 4.8 'gigatransfers' per second which is 9.6GB/s in each direction or 19.2GB/s overall. The 965 Extreme has a bandwidth of 6.4GT/s or 12.8GB/s in each direction for a total bandwidth of 25.6GB/s. The 965 Extreme is unlocked in the same way that all Extreme processors are unlocked, but the Core i7 is described as having its "Overspeed Protection removed".
Intel's DX58SO mobo: CrossFire, yes; SLI, no
Bloomfield won’t be the only variant of Nehalem as Intel has some LGA1160 versions up its corporate sleeve. The quad-core 'Lynnfield' and dual-core 'Havendale' will use a DMI bus with dual-channel DDR 3 memory. We may well see Nvidia chipsets for these processors although it 's hard to see what they would be able to bring to the party. In addition to the X58 chipset, we noted that the Intel INF driver also applies to chipset models 5520 and 5550, so it seems that there are more Nehalem chipsets in the works.
COMMENTS
Ugh!
You did it again, the graphs are completely meaningless.
@Blackadder; no, you get all the memory you buy, so long as you can address it all.
@Tak Omega; there's still time.
@Blackadder
It is just like two channel but three instead.
If you populate slot one of channels one, two and three then you have three GB RAM. If you populate both slots of each channel then you have six GB RAM.
Gaming
I really would like to see the gaming systems tested with this.
I'll give Intel credit for not coming up with a "tri-core" version simply because the chip didn't pass QA.
tri-channel memory
@blackadder
yes, in one sense, rather than one big memory DIMM, you'd want to be fitting three DIMMS to get the advantage of the three channels.
luckily memory is pretty cheap these days! time to buy some shares in a DDR3 manufacturer!
@E
"I wish there was a Sarah Palin icon. I'd use it because she is a monster too!"
Seconded that, but I think it would be more apt if it stood for 'The following post is absolute drivel, I don't know what I'm talking about' - THEN it would be suitable to put Sarah Palin next to it :-)
Or maybe we could have a couple of global warming icons, Palin vs Al Gore or something...
