In a word, Nehalem is major. The motherboard they had to test on had bugs limiting performance in memory and GPU related areas, but Nehalem nonetheless manages to well and truly top-trump a higher-clocked Penryn in every test. A 2.66Ghz Nehalem boasts a 20-50% performance increase over the 3.2Ghz Penryn, currently the fastest processor on the market. And that’s not as high as this thing will clock.

Check out the article for yourself, but here are a few quotes to whet your apetite:

• “Memory accesses on Conroe/Penryn were quick due to Intel’s very aggressive prefetchers, memory accesses on Nehalem are just plain fast. Nehalem takes a little over 2/3 the time to complete a memory request as Penryn”
• “In short: Nehalem can get data out of memory quick like bunnies.”
• “Clock for clock, Nehalem is nearly 28% faster than Penryn in our DivX test. Even better is when you put this performance in perspective: at 2.66GHz Nehalem is faster than the fastest Penryn available today the Core 2 Extreme QX9770 running at 3.2GHz. At 3.2GHz, Nehalem will be fast”
• “It’s months before Nehalem’s launch and there’s already no equal in sight, it will take far more than Phenom to make this thing sweat.”

Read the Article at Anandtech