Earlier this month Intel announced its forthcoming Nehalem CPUs would officially be called the Intel Core i7 Processor Family.

These 45nm processors with an integrated DDR3 memory controller and Intel QuickPath Interconnect Technology have yet to be released, but there is already LM_Sensors support. Thanks to a simple CPU ID patch contributed by IBM's Darrick Wong, the 0x1A Nehalem processors should work with the coretemp module and LM_Sensors to provide thermal monitoring support.

This is good news considering AMD had launched their Phenom processors last year and it took until the middle of July before there was a Phenom Thermal Driver for Linux. Granted, the Phenom support required a bit more work than simply adding in a CPU ID for the Core i7 series.