Core ix differences?

[watercooled]

Does anyone have a link/explanation to how 1156/1366 are different (I thought 1156 CPUs would need more contacts because of the PCI-E controller, not less) and the differences between 13/5/7/9 - I'm guessing i7 has HT, i5 doesn't and i3 has integrated GPU? Also what's the difference between 1156 and 1366 versions of i7? Who's idea was this - I thought they wanted to simplify things!!

[ABCx86]

Also what's the difference between 1156 and 1366 versions of i7? :

Basically they are the same but 1156 CPU's only support dual channel RAM, 1366 supports triple channel.

All i7's have Hyper-Threading, no i5's have Hyper-Threading, i3 will have it but that's only a dual core (with GPU).

i7's on 1156 supposedly have better TurboBoost feature, they Auto OC more in single threaded apps.

Any CPU on 1156 has in built PCIe controller (but only 16 lanes), 1366 has PCIe controller on the northbridge with 36 lanes.

1156 has DMI as it's system bus and 1366 has QPI, QPI is much faster.

The reason why 1366 has more pins is because of triple channel RAM support, faster bus (QPI), and when the 6 core (i9?) CPU's come out they will be on 1366, (6 core CPU's maybe require more pins??)

[watercooled]

Thanks v.much!

[kalniel]

QPI is slower than the direct link to the PCI-E controller that's contained in 1156 socket chipsets, whereas DMI is only used for peripheral devices in 1156 chipsets and therefore speed isn't important.

In essence, yes more contacts are needed, but the reduction to dual channel memory and DMI instead of QPI more than makes up for it.

This is the chipset diagram for p55 (skt 1156):



And this is the x58 (skt 1366):