Those lucky bastards over at AnandTech got their mitts on a couple totally unofficial Nehalem chips. For those of you not in the know (a group which included me until about 15 minutes ago), Nehalem is the second part of the Intel processor cycle that started with the 45nm Penryn shrinkage all those months ago. Just as the Core microarchitecture (and the phenomenally popular Core2 Duos) were the second step of the 65nm shrinkage. The new architecture (and pinout) will show what 45nm can really do.
In the tests they did, the Nehalems annihilated their Penryn Core2 Quad Q9450. Even at artificially limited clock speeds and lacking the optimizations surely forthcoming, it trashed Intel’s current flagship like it was nothing. Media encoding, memory access speeds, 2D and 3D graphical tasks, everything was improved by huge margins. I’m pumped for this. I may actually have to overhaul my system.