this is how the K10 should have been made!

Yep, this makes me say - if AMD had made something smilar, the whole world would be applauding... Now you have some "measly" performance improvement, only up to 40% in some tasks, and well, we're disappointed... I really don't get it. You lose no more than 2-3% in some games, and given that all of them are completely GPU bound at high resolutions, it should be completely irrelevant. But that's the way things are going to be, you can't increase clocks indefinitely, now it's time for the software to kick in at last and offer some better distibution of the load across cores... The only problem is... er, which software exactly? Most applications the average user needs are more than happy enough with 2 cores, they simply don't have so much data to process in order to need something more powerful.

Many thanks for a very good review. I don't share your opinion as given in the conclusion--in my view, from the presented results, i7 is an unmitigated success, even on the desktop (which was by no means a foregone conclusion in my mind). As regards games, I fully agree with the post by npp above.

Although I appreciate that it's a lot of work to perform the tests all over again, I very much hope that you'll do so in order to test i7's performance in 64-bit mode. Its greatly improved memory bandwidth and 64-bit macro-op fusion capability might lead to huge gains over Core 2--on the other hand, the smaller L2 cache might go some way to negating that advantage. It would certainly be nice to know, considering that the majority of i7 buyers will probably wish to use >4GB of RAM and thus will require a 64-bit OS. I think quite a few, if not most, of the applications you test (good benchmark suite, by the way) have 64-bit versions available.

As a final note, I'd like to see Linpack added to your performance tests, if you feel so inclined. While this is an HPC benchmark and has no direct relevance to desktop applications, it would be a good test case for the improved loop stream detector and 32- vs. 64-bit performance relative to Core 2.