Processor Comparison Table

Intel®
Core™ i7-950

Intel®
Core™ i7-920

Intel® Core™2
Quad Q9550

Number of simultaneous threads

8 (with hyper-threading)

8 (with hyper-threading)

4

Processor integrated memory controller

Yes

Yes

No

Intel® Turbo Boost Technology3

Yes

Yes

No

Number of memory channels

3

3

2

Intel® Express Chipset

X58

X58

P35, G35, P45,
G45, X38

Socket

LGA-1366

LGA-1366

LGA-775

Features and Benefits of the Intel® Core™ i7 Processor

Feature

Benefit

Intel® quad-core processor

Provides four independent execution cores in one processor package. Four dedicated processing cores help operating systems and applications deliver additional performance, so end users can experience better multitasking and multithreaded performance across many types of applications and workloads.

Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology3

Delivers two processing threads per physical core for a total of 8 threads for massive computational throughput. With Intel® HT technology, highly threaded applications can get more work done in parallel, completing their tasks sooner. With more threads available to the operating system, multitasking becomes even easier. This amazing processor can handle multiple applications working simultaneously, allowing you to do more with less wait time.

Intel® Turbo Boost Technology2

Dynamically increases the processor's frequency when needed by taking advantage of thermal and power headroom when operating below specified limits. Get more performance automatically, when you need it the most.

8 MB Intel® Smart Cache

This large last level cache enables dynamic and efficient allocation of shared cache to all 4 cores to match the needs of various applications for ultra-efficient data storage and manipulation.

Intel® QuickPath Interconnect

Intel's latest system interconnect design increases bandwidth and lowers latency, while achieving data transfer speeds as high as 25.6 GB/sec.

Integrated memory controller

An integrated memory controller with three channels of DDR3 1066 MHz offers memory performance up to 25.6 GB/sec. Combined with the processor's very efficient prefetching algorithms, this memory controller's lower latency and higher memory bandwidth delivers amazing performance for data intensive applications.

Intel® HD Boost

Includes the full SSE4 instruction set, significantly improving a broad range of multimedia and compute-intensive applications. The 128-bit SSE instructions are issued at a throughput rate of one per clock cycle, allowing a new level of processing efficiency with SSE4 optimized applications.

Digital Thermal Sensor (DTS)

Provides for more efficient processor and platform thermal control, improving system acoustics. The DTS continuously measures the temperature at each processing core. The ability to continuously measure and detect variations in processor temperature enables system fans to spin only as fast as needed to cool the system. The combination of these technologies can result in significantly lower noise emissions from the PC.

Intel® Wide Dynamic Execution

Improves execution speed and efficiency, delivering more instructions per clock cycle. Each core can complete up to four full instructions simultaneously.

Intel® Smart Memory Access

Improves system performance by optimizing the use of the available data bandwidth from the memory subsystem and reducing the effective latency of memory accesses.