Haven't check intel's website yet, but I got an email from Tigerdirect AND Newegg about this, hope you held off on your i7 purchases cause their prices might fall soon!! http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115215
What kills me is that it's 2 different chipsets and god only knows if the i3 will be a different one as well. Until Intel gets their sh!t together and figures out which platform will be supported i'm going to hold off. The last thing I want is to purchase a MB and find out Intel won't be supporting it in a year.
Actually, next year, Lga 1366 will have an I9 Processor chip with six cores or hex-core(+HT) processor. LGA is an Extreme based design. server's use the lga 1366 or x58.
i5 would only have 4 cores shown in the device manager. The i7 has 8 virtual processors shown in the device manager but only really has 4 cores.
... why would it say 8 but only have 4...? I think i'm gonna have to do a little bit of research on them....
It's because the i7 chips have 4 physical cores; each physical core is hyperthreaded. Hyperthreading is Intel's tech for improving the cpu's multitasking ability. Because each core is hyperthreaded, operating systems see and treat them as two cores; thus 8 cores. It's slightly disingenuous to say that it's an 8 core chip, but technically true in that an OS will treat it like one. Also, I believe that the i5 processors do not have hyperthreading.
The i7's support hyperthreading like the old P4's. A processor with hyper-threading enabled is treated by the operating system as two processors instead of one. This means that only one processor is physically present but the operating system sees two virtual processors, and shares the workload between them.
