Nehalem DOES use a new architecture.It includes a return to a newer version of Hyperthreading and an integrated memory controller known as 'Quickpath'. This does away with the traditional FSB. Taken from 'Anandtech'."We've been told to expect a 20 - 30% overall advantage over Penryn and it looks like Intel is on track to delivering just that in Q4. At 2.66GHz, Nehalem is already faster than the fastest 3.2GHz Penryns on the market today. At 3.2GHz, I'd feel comfortable calling it baby Skulltrail in all but the most heavily threaded benchmarks. This thing is fast and this is on a very early platform, keep in mind that Nehalem doesn't launch until Q4 of this year."Full article:http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel...doc.aspx?i=3326

It will be interesting to see how it performs in FSX.....speed for speed it should be better than the E8-series CPU's...but how will hyper threading affect it ??????

I understand FSX disables hyperthreading, so at least that part of nehalem may not help until FS11. It would be interesting to know the stance of TS2 concerning this area.

I reckon we'll be lucky just to get 'full' quad support for FS11.With 'hyper-threading' and Direct11 (10.1) still in the 'the works', and DirectX10 pretty much a 'white elephant that appears to have been 'abandoned',the development cycle always seems to miss the juicy bits!But if they were to get to grips with everything out there now - or just about - we'd be looking at octo-core processors each running 2 threads =16...pretty much 8x as powerful as now !Plus PhysX built-into the GPU, possibly taking on some of CPU role, then things really are looking bright for FSX11. But - we'll see; somehow I doubt we'll get everything.

I agree, but I am more optimistic that performance will be addressed in the FS11 RTM development plan and not left to possible future service packs.

>I agree, but I am more optimistic that performance will be>addressed in the FS11 RTM development plan and not left to>possible future service packs.Absolutely - what's the ETA on FS11 anyways ?