Intel Core i7 Benchmarks Hit The Web
 

We managed to benchmark the single-socket, quad-core, eight-threaded, 2.93GHz monster and compare it against Intel's very own Core 2 Extreme QX9770, QX6800, and AMD's Phenom 9950 Black Edition.


HEXUS' PiFast test calculates the constant Pi to 10m places, using a brute-strength approach. What's interesting is that the single-threaded test is almost as fast on the 2.93GHz Nehalem as on the 3.2GHz QX9770, suggesting that memory bandwidth is coming into serious play.


Nehalem's performance is born from taking the Core 2 architecture as a base and adding sensible, performance-enhancing additions such as an integrated memory controller, QuickPath interconnect, tiered cache, and tri-channel memory. Last but not least, SMT (simultaneous multithreading) provides a healthy boost, too.

Looking back through the numbers, the 2.93GHz Nehalem naturally comes into its own when the cores, be they physical or virtual, are pushed by the software. When this happens, it's up to 33 per cent faster than a 3.2GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770, and some 50 per cent quicker than an equivalently-clocked (Kentsfield-based) Core 2 Quad CPU.


http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=15015&page=1

Hm, unfortunately this seems to jive with http://www.anandtech.com/weblog/showpost.aspx?i=480

No huge gain in integer performance and CAS 7 memory at 1066MHz is significantly slower than CAS 4 DDR2 at 800MHz that direct memory access can't quite make up for.

it seems perfectly in line with that Anandtech blog post actually; the only benches were Nehalem will be faster is multi-CPU (^Cinebench) while single threaded applications will not be faster than current Core 2 (^PiFast)

looking at the scores only and ignoring Hexus' blabla ;)

Hm, meaning to "jive" seems to have changed, or rather local usage of it is wrong I guess. Was saying it unfortunately agrees with Gelas's article.

My concern is DDR2-800MHz CAS 4 verses DDR3-1066MHz CAS7 is no contest, huge performance penalty for the high latency. Only the most premium kits seem to do CAS 6 1333MHz? Certainly no DDR2 does CAS 5 regardless of MHz?

blame my English! I thought it meant the opposite; or added "doesn't" in front of it :)
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/jive

Aye, I should of added doesn't in front of it. Was my mistake. :)