Intel announced that its next-generation CPUs, previously codenamed Nehalem, will be branded Intel Core i7. The company said that it is to stick for the moment with its "Core" brand, which has brought significant success. Bill Calder, an Intel spokesman, told the press that the leading chipmaker intends to simplify its brand structure, eliminating designations which are too long, such as Intel Core 2 Duo/Solo/Quad.

Thus the new chips will just be called Core, while the other designation, i7 for now, points to the generation, it appears, although Intel has not fully explained how it came to use i7. It is the seventh generation since the Pentium only if you consider Core and Core 2 different generations, which is a stretch.

Intel’s Core i7 will have 2 to 8 cores and will be capable of delivering four times the memory bandwidth compared to the Intel Xeon systems. Nehalem will be equipped with 731 million transistors, up to 8 MB L3 cache, QuickPath Interconnect which will offer up to 25.6 GB per second and integrated memory controller. This feature was highlighted as the most important innovation embedded in the new chip design. AMD has been using it since 2003.

Nehalem uses the 45 nm manufacturing methods from Penryn, but has a better designed architecture. Core-wise, clock for-clock, the new Intel Core i7 is expected by testers to provide a 15 to 20 percent increase in performance compared to Penryn. There will also be a highest-end "Extreme Edition," Intel said, which will be marked with a special black logo and will have an unlocked clock multiplier.

Intel's Core i7 is one of the reasons why DreamWorks Animation SKG has announced last month that it chose Intel to supply the chips that the animation studio will use to make 3D animated films. The animated studio, which has previously used 1500 HP servers and 1000 HP workstations powered by AMD microprocessors, will now switch to devices made also by HP, but powered by Intel. DreamWorks Animated officials have said last month that the company chose Intel because of the next two chip series it has announced, of which the first is Intel Core i7, previously codenamed Nehalem. The other one is Larrabee, which will be used for the management of graphical operation and resources in computers and animation stations.