14 DAY TRIAL // Intel's Atom processors might be the guest stars at this spring's Intel Developer Forum, but it's not likely to bring the company the same revenue as the more sophisticated server and desktop PC platforms. The Nehalems will be knocking at the door later this year, and the chip manufacturer used this opportunity to give users another sneak preview of the chip.
The Nehalem micro-architecture is an extremely important turn for the company, since it will be the first chip to integrate an on-die memory controller with full support for the triple-channel 1333 MHz memory. Also, just like AMD did a long time ago, Intel will implement its new and shiny QuickPath Interconnect technology.
The QuickPath Interconnect is the rival implementation of AMD's HyperTransport 3.0 interconnect technology and will replace the already obsolete front side bus in the Nehalems and the upcoming chips.
Initially, the Nehalem processors will arrive as a refresh to the 45-nanometer micro-architecture and will integrate four cores with SSE4 instruction set. Each core will be served by a dedicated L2 cache of 256 KB, while all the cores will be sharing a huge, 8MB cache pool, that will also account for the vast majority of its 731 million transistor - in a similar manner with the Dunnington chip.
Intel demonstrated the Nehalem chip during yesterday's conference. The showcased processor was based on the A1 Bloomfield silicon revision and reached core clock speeds of 3.2 GHz. Each of the four cores comes with Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) technology, previously known as HyperThreading (HT).
According to Intel's senior vice president Patrick Gelsinger, the Xeon MP chips based on the Nehalem silicon will sport an impressive number of eight cores as well as a refurbished version of the HyperThreading technology. Given the fact that HyperThreading would allow the chip work on 16 simultaneous threads and the majority of server motherboards come with quad-socket configurations, the server industry could soon witness 64 threads per motherboard.
The Nehalem chips are expected to kick in during the last quarter of the year, in both server and desktop flavors. However, in order to update, the old motherboards will have to be replaced with units that support the new architecture and transport bus.