The expected performance boost to be derived from Intel's eagerly anticipated Nehalem microarchitecture based CPUs, codenamed Bloomfield, has been the cause of much excitement recently.

Today, the 2.66 GHz flavour of the Penryn successor has appeared, quite explicitly we might add, in these images presented on CHIPHELL.

The above image exhibits the B0 stepping Bloomfield CPU, sitting comfortably at its stock speed, utilising a 20x multiplier, with a Core VID of 1.075V.

The test bed is married with PC3-8500F DDR3 memory, whilst graphics duties are handled by an NVIDIA Quadro FX 1700 solution.

It would be a crime not to give this sample a taste of the wide open road, hence CHIPHELL obliges with a variety of benchmark passes.

A 1M Super PI run at 15.475s, sets the Bloomfield 2.66 GHz off on its way, with 3D Mark Vantage a CPU scores, next:

With a, not too shabby score of 16294, how about moving on to a CINEBENCH run to, whet your appetite?

Last, but by no means least, how does the Bloomfield match up at some good, old fashioned arithmetic?

With Bloomfield apparently seeing the light of day in 2008, enthusiasts will no doubt relish the fresh set of challenges that a new platform will bring, together with the performance gains to be attained.