Interesting Nehalem preview at Anandtech.

Note the test Nehalems are "crippled" by underclocks and immature motherboards. And still rock Penryn performance in overall performance even with that caveat. Check out the 3D performance on Page 7. Relevant, even though its CPU-side, exactly because FSX is heavily CPU-dependent.

These CPUs should prove interesting for FSX fans. The new micro-architecture is more efficient clock-per-clock.The new cache and Integrated Memory Controller give a good boost to memory throughput. So the "crippled" version in Anands' tests shows 20-50% gains on CPU side tests, which should all be to the benefit of FSX. And there are additional niceties like the unaligned memory behavior, which is something FSX does have and does hurt memory throughput on current CPUs.

One concern is the roll-out schedule as some sites are claiming server-only for Q4 2008 and desktop for 2009, that would be a bummer.

It still won't quiet the nay-sayers, but for those actually looking to have fun it might be enough to unlock the full measure of that last bit of joy in the platform, the heavies and the fast jets.

One last thought, Nehalem performance on unaligned memory accesses. FSX has these in spades. One of our performance work items for what we are calling "Wave 2009" in Core is to do work to memory align as many object types as we can. This and the IMC spell goodness for FSX, in case it wasn't already obvious.