Intel Core i7 Processor

Technology is changing rapidly and particularly in the arena of processors there are changes beyond imagination. I still remember the days when we were programming on Intel's 8085 processor boards !! It really sounds ages old now with emergence of core architecture and now moving towards tile architecture. I should mention that a small firm called Tilera came up with Tile 64 architecture. As simple as it sounds 64 processors in a single chip. Sorry for going bit off track here we are talking about Intel's core i7 the much anticipated and talked about processor.

It has 4 cores in a single chip sharing a queue to work alongside one another. Core i7's design is based on Core 2 processors but it is changed a lot the way interfaces are provided for memory and I/O. There is a three layers of catch shared between cores.One mechanism Intel uses to make its caches more effective is prefetching, in which the hardware examines memory access patterns and attempts to fill the caches speculatively with data that's likely to be requested soon.There is an integrated memory controller in the processor itself to access main memory very fast.

With the memory controller onboard and the front-side bus gone, the Core i7 communicates with the rest of the system via the QuickPath interconnect, or QPI. QuickPath is Intel's answer to HyperTransport, a high-speed, narrow, packet-based, point-to-point interconnect between the processor and the I/O chip.

You can read more technical specs about it on:
Wikipedia: Core i7