14 DAY TRIAL // Intel's upcoming and much anticipated Nehalem processor has been creating quite a buzz this year and, naturally, people were actually expecting to get a sneak preview of the soon-to-come CPU these days. According to recent reports, a couple of journalists have had the amazing opportunity of seeing what the Nehelams will be capable of. The demonstration was held by Intel's Francois Piednoel, Senior Performance Analyst for the Santa Clara-based processor manufacturer.
The journalists were able to see a test machine, allegedly running on an insanely overclocked and aircooled Nehalem, rendering, without any difficulties, high definition video and capable of scrolling, panning and zooming into thousands of photos. The test machine was built using two Intel solid state drives set up in Raid 0 configuration, thus the system's overall performance was enhanced. Reports indicate that the test machine was capable of loading various Microsoft Office applications, like Words and Excel, in one to two seconds. Furthermore, the system was also tested using Sony Vegas 8, which loaded in approximately two seconds. Piednoel was even able of fast forwarding through a large video file which, in turn, allowed the Vegas timeline and preview window to update instantly.
According to Piednoel, the Nehalem is ready for the future - a future in which the computer is believed to become an input machine. With today's current digital cameras being capable of producing 10 MP pictures, computers have to be ready for "terrascale computing," according to Piednoel. The explanation for this is that these photos are going to become part of large amounts of data, which the computer must process differently than in the past, as users require various ways to browse through said data.
Unfortunately, the journalists weren't able to find out the technical specs of the Nehalem CPU running in the testing machine. And, like them, we can only speculate on the fact that the speed of the CPU was impressive, by any standards.