Intel began sales of its high-end Core i7 desktop chips in Tokyo late Saturday night, bringing to market a series of processors that are significantly more powerful than any of the company's current desktop products.
The chips are widely expected to be used in the next generation of iMacs and Mac Pro desktops. The Core i7 is a quad core processor, but has Intel's hyper-threading technology built in -making it a virtually an 8-core processor. Early reports suggest a significant speed increase.
PC manufacturers are now selling computers with the Intel i7 processor and customers in Japan can pick up the chip. Apple, however, has not released an update to its iMac or Mac Pro range, and recently nixed speculation that an upgrade was due, stating that its holiday line-up was complete.
In a move intended to stoke demand among Japanese PC enthusiasts, shops in Akihabara, Tokyo's main electronics district, stayed open past midnight to put the first Core i7 chips on sale. The launch pre-empted a San Francisco news conference planned for today, as signs increasingly point to softening global demand for computers.
"This is a major new architecture for Intel and to be able to launch it here first to the user-community that Akihabara supports is a really exciting thing for us to do," said Steve Dallman, vice president of sales and marketing and general manager of Intel's worldwide reseller channel organisation, shortly after the midnight launch. He was referring to the PC hobbyists and gamers who crowd the areas electronics stores in search of components to build their own computers.
"One of the features in the new processor I think they are going to be very excited about is Turbo-mode," he said. "There's also Turbo-tuning, which allows them to go in for the first time and tune 20 different parameters to optimize the performance of the processor."
The 3.2GHz Core i7 965 Extreme Edition is priced at $999, while the 2.93GHz Core i7 940 and 2.66GHz Core i7 920 are priced at $562 and $284, respectively. Additional versions of Nehalem targeted at other market segments, including laptops, are expected to be released next year.
Several hundred people crowded stores that were open from around 10pm until 1am Sunday morning to check out the new chip and buy it. It was offered alongside compatible motherboards and other components.
"We ran-out of the high-end ones, the 965 processors, and the motherboards above 40,000 (US$410)," said Keisuke Kuraishi, manager of the Faith store in the electronics district.
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