The “Break it Down” Blog

Expreview.com got ahold of a marketing doc from Intel that claimed the upcoming Nehalem-based “Core i7″ architecture would be approximately 50% faster than the existing 3.2Ghz QX9770 CPU. More specifically the document quotes the following vauge-ish values:

• 38% more rendering performance
• 41% more movie editing and conversion performance
• 52% more 3D gaming performance

Let’s try and de-marketing-asshole-ify these numbers 1 at a time:

• “38% more rendering performance“: This likely means if a movie playback program is written to support the new 64-bit SSE5 (or whatever they call it) extensions from the ground up, there is the potential to crunch those decoding values 38% faster.
• “41% more movie editing and conversion performance“: Again, if the app is written ground-up using the SSE5 or equivalent 64-bit extensions, the potential is there.
• “52% more 3D gaming performance“: I have no idea how Intel qualifies this given we haven’t gotten to the point of combining the CPU/GPU just yet. This performance boost depends entirely on how the game is written. Even if it’s a physics-heavy game, that doesn’t necessarily mean it will be optimized for the Intel CPU, it could very well be written for the AGEIA PhysX platform which was bought by NVIDIA and integrated into their drivers on top of their CUDA-based software platform for the GPU.

All excitement and “50-100% faster!” claims aside, given how vauge these numbers were, I now have to assume that Nehalem will be another incremental improvement over the existing CPU architecture just like this generation was hyped 200% and delivered 50% for the generation before it.

Honestly, without AMD rocking things up and pushing hard to take back the market, Intel refuses to outclass them by leaps and bounds (understandably, there is no reason to).

With AMD saying that their upcoming K10 architecture will be 35% faster than the current iteration, Intel has no reason to up the ante with killer Nehalem chips. So sit back and relax, and enjoy some retardedly incremental upgrades for the next year and a half folks… nothing to see here, just move along.