Lynnfield has arrived

We just thought you’d like to know that a pair of Lynnfield CPUs arrived in the office today. Lynnfield is the codename for the second generation Nehalem-architecture CPUs that will replace the Core 2 later this year (for more on its actual retail branding, you can read our recent news story).

Lynnfield CPUs differ from current Core i7 CPUs such as the i7-975 in that they have four physical cores, but only the top two models will have logical Hyper-Threaded cores - lower spec Lynnfields will not support Hyper-Threading at all. In addition Lynnfield has a dual-channel DDR3 integrated memory controller instead of supporting triple-channel DDR3. As a result of these changes, Lynnfield CPUs will ship with LGA1156 packaging, so will not work in existing LGA1366 Core i7 or LGA775 Core 2 motherboards.[break]

We’re still waiting for some motherboards to arrive, so you'll have to wait a little longer for any benchmark results.

In the meantime you can feast your eyes on these rather delicious looking CPUs.




At Intel's request we've obscured the model numbers, but we can confirm that the samples we have are the highest frequency model of Lynnfield.



Here's the same Lynnfield (left) shot next to a a LGA1366 Core i7-965 (right). As you can see, Lynnfield is a fair bit smaller than Core i7.



Past, present and future. From left to right, a LGA775 Core 2, a LGA1366 Core i7 and a LGA1156 Lynnfield.

As soon as Intel gives us the go ahead to publish some benchmark results, hopefully towards the end of the month, you’ll be the first to know.