Sunday, February 1st 2009
Intel Plans New Stepping for its 2.66GHz Core i7 920 Processor
Intel has announced plans to supply its partners and distributors with a new batch of Core i7 920 processors, that have their stepping updated from the current C-0 to D-0. Ready to ship on March 2nd, the new stepping will feature:
Sources:
TechConnect Magazine, Intel
- New S-spec (from SLBCH to SLBEJ) and Material Master numbers for the converting products.
- CPUID will change from 0x000106A4 to 0x000106A5.
- The electrical, mechanical and thermal specifications remain within the current specifications. Intel anticipates no changes to customer platforms designed to previous Intel guidelines.
- Readable serial number will be removed from the package ink swatch to fully mitigate the potential risk of the IHS cosmetically overlapping a marked serial number. There is no change to the ULT matrix content which continues to contain the serial number.
38 Comments on Intel Plans New Stepping for its 2.66GHz Core i7 920 Processor
I've been eying a i7 and since this is a new stepping i wanna know if its better. Usually newer revisions have lead to better oc. It would be nice if we had another G0 series
You see, the B3 stepping could overclock "well" but it could still never overclock to anything near what G0 could. With an Ultra 120 eXtreme you'd get 70C load on both chips - the B3 running 3.2Ghz and the G0 running 3.6-3.8Ghz. The only problem with the G0 is that at the time, there weren't any boards to overclock them past 3.6Ghz, and if you wanted SLi that made it even worse.
oh well back on topic hopefully whatever they are changing doesn't make the chips worse.
G0 is fixing some of these issues: download.intel.com/design/processor/specupdt/320836.pdf
...especially TLB bug which IIRC Core2 G0 steppings have already fixed.