14 DAY TRIAL // Intel's Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and general manager of the Digital Enterprise Group, stated earlier this month, during the pre-IDF press briefing, that the chip manufacturer will start shipping eight-core processors based on the Nehalem silicon until the end of 2008.
However, recent rumors emerging from the industry reveal that the eight-core chips will likely be held off from the market for some extra time. More than that, the six-core high end offerings based on the Westmere micro-architecture are slated to arrive no sooner than 2010. However, the Westmere processors will be Intel's first 32-nanometer processors and will lead the way to the extremely powerful Sandy Bridge silicon.
According to the sources, Intel's first chip based on the Nehalem micro-architecture will be the Bloomfield chip that is especially targeted at servers, workstations and high-end desktop PCs. It is slated for release in the second half of the year and will come with four multi-threading capable cores built on the 45-nanometer process node. More than that, the chips will sport a built-in triple-channel memory controller, 8MB of shared L3 cache, and Intel's new QuickPath Interconnect technology.
The Westmere chips will be manufactured using the 32-nanometer process node and will also power servers, workstations and high-end desktop systems. Since the Westmere is just a technology refresh for the Nehalem silicon, the upcoming chips will share much of Bloomfield's features. However, they will come with six processing cores and 12 MB of L3 cache pool.
Other updates to the Westmere chip include enhanced Trusted Execution Technology (codenamed La Grande SX), as well as AES-NI encryption support.