Intel Corp. announced yesterday that a new line of desktop computer chips, released under the well known Core brand and called i7, will be available on the market over the next few months.

The company’s new design, code-named Nehalem, is expected to offer a much higher performance and will also be energy efficient. Intel also plans other releases during 2009 for a variety of chips, starting the campaign with the i7 identifier.

"Expect Intel to focus even more marketing resources around that name and the Core i7 products starting now," Sean Maloney, general manager of Intel's sales and marketing group recently explained in a news release.

Nehalem’s design will include two to eight cores, two-way simultaneous multithreading and a 4-instruction-wide ISA. Besides these features, the add-ons include the QuickPath interconnect with up to 25 Gbytes/s per link, and an integrated memory controller which at this point is only available on Advanced Micro Devices’ x86 processors. Also, there will be included a new 8-Mbyte shared level 3 cache.

More details about the upcoming releases are expected to be offered during the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, which is scheduled to begin on August 19.

Intel Corp. is the largest semiconductor company in the world and its processors can be found in most of the world’s personal computers. It was founded in 1968 under the name Integrated Electronics Corporation and over time its offer diversified, at this point including network cards, ICs, graphic cards, flash memory, motherboard chipsets, embedded processors and many other devices.