Intel just did a counter attack at the right time! After knewing AMD is catching up with the launching of its first 45nm Opteron processor, Intel today announced its latest desktop processor, Core i7!

This new desktop processor from Intel, the first member of a new family of Nehalem processor designs, is claimed to be the fastest desktop processor by scoring a world record of 117 for the SPECint_base_rate2006 benchmark test. This is by far the most sophisticated Intel desktop processor ever built with new technologies that boost performance.

Some highlights of Intel Core i7 :-

• Clock Speed at 2.66GHz-3.20GHz
• 8MB L3 Cache, shared among all 4 cores
• Turbo Boost Technology
• Integrated for higher memory bandwidth (somehow AMD has been doing this since 2001).
• 2x the bandwidth, compared to previous Intel Quad Core “Extreme” processors
• 40% performance increase for immersive 3-D games, without increasing power consumption
• Intel Quickpath Technology, enables it to 8-threaded (4 cores running multiple computing threads simultaneously) performance
• Power Gates, for power-saving & performance boosting