Otellini unveils Nehalem

[Teaf]

During this morning's keynote, Intel CEO Paul Otellini revealed that the company's next generation architecture is on track for the end of 2008.

He hailed the design as "a very dynamic design from a number of perspectives."

From Intel's perspective, Otellini said that Nehalem is a very modular design, and from the developers' standpoint, it's also very dynamic too. He said that developers will be able to turn cores, caches and threads on and off.

Nehalem will launch with an eight core product in 2008, however each core will have two threads, making a total of 16 threads on a single CPU package. The design was completed just a few weeks ago and will feature 731 million transistors.

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More info further in the thread:
Post #19

In case anyone's interested

 

[Teaf]

I'm kinda debating over the whole octo-core thing myself. I mean quads are barely getting used at the moment in the mainstream world, and probably are still not going to be heavily used when Nehalem appears, and then nothing will use 8 cores pretty much so I'm wondering if it's going to work out well. Sure the chip speed will increase due to better architecture and so forth, but I guess I'm just suprised it turned into octo-core rather than much higher frequency speeds (4Ghz and above).

 

[Teaf]

No idea why people are so hostile to multi-core.

I wouldn't call it hostile or I am not hostile towards them at least, but I think it's mainly because dual core was a couple of years ago, whilst octo-core is 1 year away and quad is now and we still yet to see quad's being utilised properly in games and applications. Talrinys does make an excellent point however and a good read, thanks for the info

 

[Teaf]

These are going to be in the form of Quad Core as well right?

Just octo-core I think? Although they are in two different flavours of process it seems, 45nm and later on 32nm.

 

[Teaf]

Bit of extra info for interested parties.

“Next year, we’ll have 45 nanometers with a new micro-architecture called Nehalem. We are on track to second half ‘08. What I wanted to say is that the design is complete. Nehalem was finished about – I guess about a month ago. We have wafers running in fab. This is one of the first Nehalem wafers that’s come out of fab,”

“Nehalem is a very dynamic design from a number of perspectives. From an Intel perspective, it’s a very modular design. We have the ability to change the configuration of cores, to change the configuration of cache size, to change the configuration of I/O, power envelopes and so forth to be able to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse segment of our product needs,”

“At the largest configuration that we'll ship in 2008, they'll be an eight-core product. Eight core on one die, and each core will have two threads. So, each eight-core die will be supporting 16 threads. Think about what the performance could be in a dual-core or quad-core and beyond configuration for simultaneous multitasking,”

“Now, Nehalem is looking great for having silicon for only about three weeks. And it’s great to see it running major operating systems and applications. And we’re looking forward to turning it into products in 2008,”

So looks like Nehalem will be available in 2 core (4 thread), 4 core (8 thread) and 8 core (16 thread). That's kinda nice, I'd imagine the 2 / 4 core stuff is going to be quite cheap to the 8 core stuff and we might see something like the E2140/2160 now but in 4 core style.

Oh also, Penryn will start at 2.55 Ghz seemingly for the chips and go up to 3.15 Ghz. Over the space of 2008, they will reach 4Ghz STOCK speeds, and Nehalem is apparantly STARTING at 4Ghz... 4Ghz - 5Ghz stock 8 core / 16 thread cpus with this arch. and technology will be a sight to behold!