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Today marks the release of Intel's latest and greatest processor architecture to date. For the past two years Intel has dominated the CPU market with their Core 2 processors, reaping havoc on AMD's Athlon and Phenom products. Yet despite of this significant dominance, Intel will be pushing the Core 2 aside and make room for the new Core i7 processor series.

Today we will be introducing you to three new Core i7 processors based on the new Intel Nehalem microarchitecture, each featuring 4-cores and operating in the 2.66 to 3.20GHz range. Like the Core 2 family, these new processors feature model numbers, designed to keep things simple.

The Core i7 965 Extreme Edition runs at 3.20GHz and features a QPI (QuickPath Interface) throughput of 6.4GT/s, which is the key difference here. The mainstream versions of the processor include the Core i7 920 and 940, clocked at 2.66GHz and 2.93GHz, respectively. These more affordable processors feature a QPI throughput of just 4.8GT/s, so it will be interesting to discover what kind of impact this has on performance.

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