A few sources have told us that the first Nehalem generation, Core i7 CPU codenamed Bloomfield will launch in week 46. The launch should take place between the 10th and 14th of November and we've learned that the Japanese part of Intel might get a green light to start selling its units a bit earlier.

Japanese customers might be able to buy Core i7 in the first days of November. In some of the task Core i7 will definitely be kicking Core 2 Quad's butt, but in some tasks such as games it won't really give you a great boost.

There will be plenty of boards based on X58 ready for this launch, and most of the boards are finished as we speak, at least the final prototypes. We’ve seen partner boards up and running back in August and these boards even had some good overclocking features and performance, and we expect things to get even better with the final boards.