Originally posted by: AdamK47
Originally posted by: taltamir
the biggest baddest most interesting feature on i7 is that it can shut off individual cores for power saving... which would never ever come close to paying for the extremely high premium they are asking for it.
With overclocking being harder on the sucker, ram being more expensive, and requiring a new socket, the whole thing is very disappointing.
Intel was saying that this would be to C2D what Core was to netburst... liars.
The ability to shut off cores is the most interesting feature? You would put that above say... the integrated memory controller? How about it being a native quad core? Shared Level 3 cache? Triple channel DDR3 maybe? Heck, I'd put Hyperthreading over that. There are a ton of features I would put above the ability to shut off unused cores.
integrated memory controller means greater bandwidth, which is somewhat nice, but leads to a small speed increase mostly for servers and not for gamers.
Triple channel? a design choice shown to have no benefit to the home user. (and increases cost).
Native quad core? what does that matter? i don't CARE about that ENGINEERING choice.. i care about the performance i get (if it gives me more performance, then good! otherwise, meh).
Shared level 3 cache, useful, but so far it just serves to make the chip smaller and cheaper to make, because L3 cache was already massive before. This is an engineering cost, what matters is the performance it gives.
Hyperthreading.. now there you have a FEATURE rather then an engineering choice, the effect of hyperthreading go beyond "more/less performance". However, while that is nice for the FUTURE, future proofing is stupud. And most games only use 2 threads/cores, hyperthreading is not gonna help for the majority of things today, it WILL make the chip faster in 2010. but by that time it will be much cheaper to buy.
Before you say shutting down unused cores is also an engineering choice... it is actually a feature like hyperthreading... it allows for single / dual core OC, and more importantly, for decrease of power. I guess I should have said "power savings due to shutting down".