Bit-tech was able to take some photos of a Nehalem Bloomfield processor as well as an MSI motherboard equipped with a Socket 1366 and X58 chipset combined with an ICH10.
According to the manufacturer’s own words, the new high end Northbridge heats up significantly more than its predecessors despite the 65nm engraving and the fact that the memory controller was transferred to the CPU. The cause is most likely QPI bus support which replaces the FSB. In terms of PCI-Express 2.0, there will be 36 lanes.
Otherwise,
VR-Zone has published the CPU scores in 3DMark Vantage of a Bloomfield set at 2.66 GHz combined with an X58 which were as high as 16,334. This is approximately 45% faster than a quad core Penryn set at the same frequency. Of course, it’s only a vague indication and not a complete test although it is still interesting.
We should keep in mind that the next Intel CPU will support up to 8 simultaneous threads thanks to its 4 cores and SMT (Simultaneous Multi-Threading, quite similar to HyperThreading) and DDR3 on 3 channels. The Santa Clara giant has mentioned performances that are 20% to 100% higher in applications which are multi threaded and 10% to 25% in those that are not.
