Intel ships next-gen core i7 microprocessor
WinInfo | at | by Mike
With an odd sense of nervousness tied back to its mid-1990's Pentium debacle, microprocessor giant Intel on Monday delivered its next-generation Core i7 chips to customers. The i7 represents Intel's biggest architectural change since its mobile-oriented Core chips debuted almost three years ago. This time around, the base chips feature four processor cores, each of which is capable of executing two threads simultaneously, effectively providing the performance of 8 processors in compatible applications.
The Core i7 chips--codenamed Nehalem during development--have debuted to overwhelmingly positive reviews. But so did the original Pentium, which was quickly found to have a small but crucial floating point bug that necessitated a $400 million recall in 1994.