Intel Corp.’s new chip family called Intel Core i7 and also known as Nehalem appears to have a significant impact right from the beginning, with many reports praising its abilities to speed up certain computing tasks with about 30 to 40 percent, compared to the results of other Intel chips. The most impressive results were recorded for tasks like video encoding and also rendering three-dimensional images.

The company scheduled the release for November 17 but decided to provide samples to reviewers in order to receive their feedback and offer customers a complete presentation. The prices will range from a 2.66 gigahertz model at $284 to an Extreme Edition gamers model operating at 3.2 gigahertz and available for $999.

The i7 provides some new features that cannot be found on neither the Phenom nor the Core 2. One of them is Intel’s HyperThreading (HT) technology and the other is Intel’s Dynamic Speed technology. The first is used whenever more than four process threads will demand service simultaneously, in order to speed things up, while the second allows the processor to detect an unevenly balanced load and automatically boost the speed of the cores with the most work to do.

There are three Core i7's that will be introduced at launch: the 2.66-GHz Core i7-920 which will be priced at $284; the 2.93-GHz Core i7-940 which will be available for $562; and the 3.20-GHz Core i7 Extreme 965, priced at $999. All three i7 cores are 263 square millimeters in size, and include 731 million transistors.