I splurged recently and got a nice new I7 920 CPU (D0 stepping), which of course meant getting a new motherboard and new RAM. I waited a week for the parts to arrive and am currently posting from the machine, but is it all roses?
The I7 CPUs from Intel have 4 physical cores and with HyperThreading support you can add another 4 to that. Don't expect those 4 HyperThreading cores to perform as real cores though, they do not. In a lot of cases HyperThreading actually decreases performance. Seeing 8 cores in Task Manager though sure is cool.
Unfortunately switching from a CORE2DUO to an I7 didn't go smoothly when it came to Windows 7. It simply blue screened (BSOD) just after the Windows logo appeared. I have about 8 hard drives laying around with various OSes on them, and only one of them would work. Vista x64, Windows XP, 2000 all refused to work. Ubuntu 8 however booted. So much for Microsoft being the "easy to use" OS.
After spending a few hours trying to get my old Windows 7 to work I gave up and started the long re-installation process. Usually the first thing I do with a new system is stretch its legs and see whether I have an overclocking dud or king. Something I really should have looked at closely before purchasing the I7 is the fact that these CPUs get hot. I mean really hot. The stock cooler often hits temperatures upwards of 80 degrees C when you are running at stock speeds!
So I readjusted my case to optimize airflow and overclocked a bit. The new D0 I7 chips have a reputation of being excellent overclockers and mine is no different. It went to 4GHz without raising a sweat. Ok well it did raise a sweat. The stock cooler cannot keep this chip running at full load at 4GHz, it just blue screens when you hit about 85C. I am in the process of ordering a new cooler for it.
My E6750 Core2 was run at 3.2GHz for its entire life and at the moment my I7 is on 3.33GHz and is stable at full load, even with the stock cooler. So the speeds of my I7 and Core2 are similar, I thought giving RetroCopy a run through would show me just how much more work the I7 could do over the Core2. Boy was I wrong. It's actually slower!
Why it is slower I am yet to determine, but I am not too pleased with the results at the moment. It is _only_ 2% slower, but after hearing all the hype about the I7 I was ready to be blown away. The memory bandwidth and latency blow my old Core2 out of the water, and the I7 has a MHz advantage so I'm not sure why the I7 is getting beat by a 2 year old chip. Of course once I can keep this thing cool at 4+GHz it should easily be better. I will keep you all updated on my findings with the I7.