On August 11, Intel formally announced its next and 7th generation processor family, named “Core i7″. The new processors will feature up to 8 cores (up to 8 processors per chip) and speeds up to 3.2GHz.
As overall computer performance improves, there’s been a shift in focus from overall clock speed to more processors per chip, since the introduction of Intel and AMD’s first dual and quad core processors hit the market in 2006. It’s expected that we should start seeing computers with the new i7 processors starting early 2009.
Now for my input. Although these new processors sound very impressive, the hard truth is that users will probably see little performance improvement over today’s processors until most or all software developers start coding their software to support multiple processors by default. Today, there are still very few programs that support multiple processors. Most common software programs are still coded to support a single processor only, so the average business or home user won’t see much of a improvement in performance over what’s available today. I suspect it will probably be a couple of more years before software developers start supporting these new processors.
I’m excited in the direction everything is headed however. We’ll just have to be a little more patient until we see this happen.