BAD HARDWARE WEEK

Nehalem TLB bug obviously moved from the unknown knowns to the next knowing level.
"In rare instances, improper TLB invalidation may result in unpredictable system behavior, such as system hangs or incorrect data. Developers of operating systems should take this documentation into account when designing TLB invalidation algorithms. For the processors affected, Intel has provided a recommended update to system and BIOS vendors to incorporate into their BIOS to resolve this issue."

Thus, bad hardware rumors are true.
See yourself below, no matter how many cores are enabled, no improved performance in many applications.
Actually, if there are three or more active threads though, the Core i7 processor will not overclock any of its processing cores. Thus, Nehalem is so weak that needs single core acceleration. And that is what helps most of the available applications.