Intel has formally confirmed that its upcoming line of Nehalem processors will still hold to the Core naming scheme.

Nehalem will be known as Core i7 for at least all its desktop variants, which will include dual- and quad-core mainstream processors as well as a 3.2GHz Extreme processor for high-end gaming desktops.

The first Core i7-based processors are expected to be released in the fourth quarter of this year and will be Intel’s first native quad-core processors.

It and will signal the comeback for Intel’s Hyper-Threading Technology following its absence from the original Core microarchitecture. This will enable the chips to handle up to eight software threads on the four physical processing cores.