It's a bit odd that Fudzilla is predicting a January 3rd release since that's a Sunday, but otherwise the general timeline sounds reasonable. They're claiming that the offering will come in "2.4GHz to 2.66GHz with prices ranging from $225 to $332." I just hope they're right, because frankly I don't know if I can convince myself to wait much longer before ordering a MacBook Pro. [Fudzilla via Mac Rumors via TUAW]

The i9 doesn't extract significant advantages from its pumped core count (which brings processing thread count up to 12) in a lot of day to day tasks, so don't expect to see an increase in game performance, Windows startup speed or other single-core optimized tasks. It's when you start rendering video or doing 3D modeling—tasks that are suited to parallelization—that the i9 flexes its muscles.

That's roughly a 50% increase in video encoding performance over a similarly clocked i7—already no slouch by any existing standards.

The i9 processors won't ship until sometime in early to mid 2010, and when they do, expect them to be a bit on the expensive side. But man, 50%. I think I can stand to save up a few more bucks, honestly. [PCLab via Electronista]

With a 17.3-inch (1600x900) display, the 7lb system starts with a 2.1GHz Dual Core T4300, DVD burner, 320GB HDD, 4GB RAM, 512MB Radeon 4570 and a footprint that can support a slew of ports—two USBs, one USB/eSATA, HDMI, Display Port, VGA, and Firewire.

But you can scale the power all the way up to an i7.

The multitouch display (we're looking for confirmation on whether or not it's capacitive tech) supports the pre-installed Windows 7 along with Dell's own touch software.

The Studio 17 Touch is on sale now to ship this December. [Dell via Electronista]

Specifically, using his charts and mine, it wasn't hard to recognize the jump in the multithreaded, 64 bit results from geek bench in the categories of integer, floating point and memory streaming tests, as well as the threaded tests. (Memory tests were slightly faster, the others were drastically so.) Interesting, as the Core i5 chip is clocked at 2.66GHz and the Core2Duo iMac I tested runs at 3.06GHz.

(The turbo boost function, which overclocks the Core i5 chip to up to 3.2GHz when running non-multithreaded apps, should be kicking in performance here, too.)

Interesting, but two things to remember: Core i7 chips are coming out for the iMac shortly and will run at 2.8GHz and have hyperthreading so the 4 cores emulate 8. And there are still not many (if any at all) major OS X apps that can take advantage of Snow Leopard's multicore support. [Electronista's tests, Gizmodo's iMac Review]

Of course, this appears to be confirmation of the obvious, that Apple will be updating their MacBook Pro line to include Core i5/i7 chips following the white MacBook's Pro-level spec bump last week. (Apple will need to adopt these new chipsets to stay competitive.) Now we just need an answer to the far more important question: When? [Foro Applesana via AppleInsider]

They demonstrated power drain by playing a DVD on two identically configured ThinkPad T400s: one with Windows 7 (15.6 watts), the other with Windows Vista (20.5 watts). That could translate to about 1.4 hours of increased battery life.

The improvement comes through "timer coalescing", which lets one processor core sleep as long as possible if it's not needed.

The big gains should come when Intel's Arrandale (laptop Core i7/i5) chip hits later this year, possibly with Windows 7 on October 22. The dual-core processor (based on the 32nm Westmere shrink of Nehalem) is able to execute two threads per core.

So, yup, November is looking like a good time to pick up a new laptop. [PC Mag and PC World]

OEMs like AVADirect and Eurocom—who both must know that Intel will eventually release a mobile version of the i7— are both offering Nehalem laptops, starting at around $2500, that will do all those wonderful things that i7 processors can do, centimeters from your nuts.[PCWorld via The Inq]

At this stage WARP won't be intended as a gameworthy replacement for dedicated graphics cards, but it could help avoid another "Vista Capable" type debacle by standardizing essential graphics capabilities across virtually all hardware. That said, it's not that slow: Microsoft reports that when paired with the rather awesome i7, it runs Crysis faster than Intel's integrated DX10 solutions. Like, 42% faster. Granted, that's still only 7.36FPS on the game's lowest settings, but don't miss the point here: Windows 7 will run Crysis—or any other game—without a video card. [CustomPC via Slashdot]

Last week, you probably noticed new computers from Dell, Gateway and others using a brand new, bizarre-sounding chip from Intel: the Core i7. You might have even seen some benchmarks and features showing that this is a real beast of processor. Well, we're pretty excited about the Core i7, so here's a quick guide to why it's so awesome:

Hokay, so the way Intel develops chips is on what it calls the "tick-tock cycle". The "tick" is the improvement of its current microarchitecture, mainly shrinking it down to make it more energy efficient, along with other tweaks. As you now can guess, the "tock" indicates the launch of a totally new microarchitecture.

Penryn, for instance, was the tick to the Core 2's tock, shrinking it down from a 65-nanometer process to 45nm. Core i7 is a tock, using a completely new microarchitecture codenamed Nehalem. Core i7 Nehalem is actually a dramatic step forward, remedying several lingering Intel architecture deficiencies that AMD actually had them beat on years ago. So, here are four things that specifically make the new chip awesome:

Bye Bye Front-Side Bus
The ancient front-side bus setup has long been a drag on Intel's chips, and they're finally ditching it. The FSB essentially carried data between the CPU and memory controller hub (which is also out the window, more on that in a sec), but that didn't work so well when you started talking buckets of cores. In its place is a new tech called QuickPath Interconnect that'll make the old bottlenecks history and running tons of cores even better. QPI uses direct point-to-point connections that have a bandwidth of about 25GB/s, way faster than what FSB could offer. The downside is that it requires a new QPI-friendly motherboard. This concept is kind of cribbed from AMD, whose HyperTransport has been doing something similar for a longass time.

Integrated Memory Controller and Triple-Channel Memory
You might notice a pattern that a lot of Nehalem's performance boosts have to do with better access to memory and fatter bandwidth. Yet another tech that AMD held over Intel's head for years is an integrated memory controller, which Core i7 finally uses. Basically this just means that the memory controller is on the same die as the CPU, cutting down memory latency. Before, with Intel chips, communication had to take place across the front-side bus, making stuff slooooow. The last memory bonus is that Core i7 supports triple-channel memory. Right now, you're probably on a computer using dual-channel memory (in English, I mean that it uses RAM sticks in sets of two). Core i7 will make three sticks of RAM the new standard—so keep an eye out for plenty of 6GB and 12GB systems running around.

The Return of Hyper-Threading
Intel abandoned Hyper-Threading after the Pentium 4, but it's back in Core i7 (and Atom, but really, psh). Basically, it's a parallel-processing tech that runs multiple threads simultaneously. In English, it divvies up tasks so they can be crunched by a processor simultaneously, instead of one after the other. It short, it makes video encoding and other parallel-friendly processes run faster. We're interested to see what kind of gains this will produce in tandem with programs coded to take advantage of threading, not to mention the next great operating systems, Snow Leopard and Windows 7, which will supposedly make better use of multiple cores and parallel processing than current OSes.

Built-In Power Management and Overclocking
Core i7 is pretty much a beast already, but whereas Intel used to say that overclocking was bad for your processor, now with the Core i7, it's built right in. The Core i7 is really aggressive with power management, more so than Core 2, so it'll sip juice when it's not busy, and then crank the power when it needs it. In the BIOS now, you can set it to overclock the CPU in certain situations, and customize that by thermal ratings so it won't overheat.

So yeah, Core i7 gets our engines running, and we're not even chip nerds. (Honest!) Sadly though, right now there are just a few Core i7 chips available, and they're all for desktops. There's not much of a downside for portables—save for the need for new motherboards and the DDR3 RAM already used by premium laptops—but before you see it in a Dell XPS notebook or MacBook Pro, you're going to see it in a lot of desktop gaming and graphics-intensive systems. Laptops probably won't appear until way into next year, but we think they'll be well worth the wait.

Something you still wanna know? Send any questions about chips, Pringles or the Hillary Swank movie The Core to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.

Cnet says that the Falcon Northwest Mach V has the latest and bestest combination of components there is, which is what makes it the fastest thing on chips:

• 3.79GHz Intel Core i7 965 Extreme Edition.
• An Intel X58 chipset.
• 12GB of 1,066MHz DDR3 SDRAM.
• 2 x 1GB ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2
• 1TB 7,200RPM Hitachi hard drive.
• 80GB Intel X-25M solid-state drive.

All this comes at a pretty hefty $8,028 price tag, including the Ferrari red paint job, which is a $500 option. Unfortunately, the automotive-class red paint job reportedly helps you get at least three extra frames per second in Crysis. Fortunately, there's a potential DIY fix to save those $500: Apply a few adhesive flames to the chassis, and Bob's your uncle. [Cnet]

Video: Hands-On with Samsung i7 Digicam with Rotating Display [MobileMag]

–Travis Hudson

Samsung i7 [LegsGoDigital]