Intel Core i7 940 - DigitalVersus

Intel Core i7 940


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Socket	1366
Number of cores	4
Clock rate	2.93 GHz
Cache	8 MB
Thermal Design Power	130 W
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Technology	45 nm
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Régis Jehl
Test date: December 11, 2008

The Core i7 Range

Intel unveiled its Core i7 900 were introduced in November 2008 with three models: the 920, this 940 and the 965 Extreme. All three are quad-core CPUs with Hyper-Threading technology allowing compatible software to simulate the presence of eight cores.

Based on the Nehalem architecture, the i7 900 processors have an 8 MB cache and sit in a 1366 socket. Engineered at 45 nm, they have a very high Thermal Design Power of 130 W.

Just like the rest of Intel's Core i7 range, the 940 has a few extra features compared to the earlier Core 2 Quad Q9.

First of all, the memory controller is built into the processor rather than sitting on the motherboard, meaning Intel can make the most of DDR3 RAM. This means that you can put up to three RAM chips on your motherboard to benefit from a whole lot of bandwidth.

Hyper threading, one of our favorite features in the old Pentium 4 series, is also back. Put simply, this allows you to simulate an extra process running on each core of the processor, meaning your operating system will treat a quad-core processor as if it had eight cores, allowing for finer control of the processor's performance

In general terms, this processor performs better than a Core 2 Quad Q9650, and in applications that can make the most of multiple cores, the Core i7 940 really steps ahead of the game.

Let's take the example of applying filters in Adobe Photoshop: it takes 2 minutes 18 seconds to edit our test image on the Q9650 but just 1 minute 53 seconds on the i7 940.

The speed increase is also visible when encoding video. Our standard test uses the H.264 codec, and here the i7 is around 8% faster, finishing the encoding in 1 minute 30 seconds instead if the 1 minute 37 seconds of the Q9650.

Compare the Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 with the AMD Phenom X4 9750 and other CPUs in our Product Face-Off

Let's finish by looking at energy use. While idle, it was clear that Intel has put some thought into reconfiguring the power requirements of the Core i7 series by 160 W--almost as little as the Core 2 Duo E7300 with just two cores.

This low consumption is mostly down to the new 'uncore' system that Intel has developed, which cuts power to any of the cores not currently in use.

When the processor has more work to do, though, more cores are activated, leading to a peak power consumption on our test PC of 320 W, which puts the Core i7 920 above the AMD Phenom X4 9750, which was already rather greedy.