"Nehalem" is the name of a bay, a state park, a river, a highway and a city in Oregon. It's also the codename the chip giant used to describe its new generation of CPUs that will incorporate a memory controller on the processor, just like AMD's Phenom, Athlon and Opteron processors.

Effective today, you can call the desktop processors by their official name: the Core i7.

Intel will ship three high-end desktop Core i7 processors by year end, with mid-range and server products to appear in 2009, according to George Alfs, a spokesman for the company. Oddly, he said the "i7" name has no direct meaning, but it is the start of similar brandings for future Nehalem processors.

These i7 processors will be quad-core chips with hyperthreading, so the processor can handle up to eight threads at once. The i7 is also expected to support DDR3 memory, which is higher performance than the DDR2 used in desktops by both Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) and AMD (NYSE: AMD).

The News from IDF

Intel made the announcement ahead of its Intel Developer Forum where Nehalem is expected to be a major topic of conversation. The show kicks off August 19 at the George E. Moscone Center in San Francisco. Opening keynote will be by Chairman Craig Barrett, with the main product keynote coming from Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and general manager of the Digital Enterprise Group.

David "Dadi" Perlmutter, executive vice president and general manager of the mobility group, follows Gelsinger and will discuss Intel's mobile and desktop future plans, including the company's first quad-core mobile processor – first announced at the Montevina launch last month – and the second generation of "small form factor" processors.

Intel will provide an update on its family of flash memory-based Solid State Drives (SSD) on Tuesday.

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Wednesday's activities includes a talk on the Atom processor, several System on Chip (SoCs) products, Intel's Larrabee project, and discussion of a recent partnership Intel announced with Dreamworks Animation.

CTO Justin Rattner's is the keynote speaker for day three, followed by a sit-down chat with Dr. Moira Gunn, host of "Tech Nation" and "BioTech Nation" and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.