I think that Intel is competing with itself in the high end desktop market with this new processor. It is a better processor than Core 2 but not world-shakingly so.

What is news here is that the Opteron's dominance in HPC and 4+ server market has just been eliminated. i7 is a server monster processor.

Will the good folks at el Reg be posting numbers for LAMP stack, IIS stack, Oracle, SQL Server and IBM DB2?

I wish there was a Sarah Palin icon. I'd use it because she is a monster too!

which I would LOVE to run on this kind of beast. We have some 4 x quad core Xeon boxes here, but I cannot get beyond 8-9x speed up (as opposed to 4.2-5.6 x speed up on just 4 opteron cores). The bloody front-side bus is just killing performance. It's not a problem with the code, it quite happily parallellizes to 12-15x speed up on a 16 processor MIPS based shared memory machine, see

http://www.cs.rug.nl/~michael/pamiparmaxtree.pdf

I hope our powers that be can be convinced to buy this kind of kit (where's my cattle prod?)

Those of us who deploy servers would heartily disagree, particularly in the non-artificially restricted Linux world

"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...

If I understand this correctly, you need twice as much memory in this configuration. That is, 6 GiB installed and only 3 GiB will be available, wrong?

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.

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.

@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!

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.