Intel had a big hit with Conroe, the Core 2 Duo processor, and two years on, it seems it has another in Nehalem, according to unofficial benchmarks at Anandtech. The site says:
We've been told to expect a 20 - 30% overall advantage over Penryn and it looks like Intel is on track to delivering just that in Q4. At 2.66GHz, Nehalem is already faster than the fastest 3.2GHz Penryns on the market today. At 3.2GHz, I'd feel comfortable calling it baby Skulltrail in all but the most heavily threaded benchmarks. This thing is fast and this is on a very early platform, keep in mind that Nehalem doesn't launch until Q4 of this year.
The hyperthreading chip shows up as 8 processors in Windows Vista.
Intel is shipping early Nehalem chips to motherboard designers etc. It will probably be next year before they appear in affordable notebook and desktop PCs.
