Intel has finally launched its fastest processor ever, Intel® Core™ i7. First member of a new family of processors – Nehalem – Core i7 accelerates video editing, immersive games and other popular Internet and computer activities by up to 40 percent without increasing power consumption.

The Intel® Core™ i7 processor holds a new world record of 117 for the SPECint_base_rate2006 benchmark test that measures the performance of a processor. This is the first time ever for any single processor to exceed a score of 100 points, the company release said.

Through a sophisticated on-die power control unit and using new “power gate” transistors based on Intel’s advanced 45 nanometer, high-k metal gate manufacturing process, Turbo Boost technology of the processor automatically adjusts the clock speed of one or more of the four individual processing cores for single- and multi-threaded applications to boost performance, without increasing power consumption. Sleep mode has also been introduced for the desktop version.

With a double memory bandwidth than previous platforms, the processor also allows multiple computing threads to run simultaneously, enabling it to do two things at once. As a result, the Core i7 quad-core processor delivers 8-threaded performance. Core i7 also offers a better performance for immersive 3-D games.

All eyes are now on AMD to come up with a more better solution.