Intel Corp., the world’s forerunning manufacturer of computer processors, has this week confirmed that its new Nehalem chip micro-architecture is in the development pipeline for inclusion in regular consumer laptop hardware, reports eNews 2.0.
Intel Corp. confirms that its Nehalem micro-architecture is coming to conventional laptop computers. Credit: Intel.
However, the appearance of Nehalem in the laptop market will apparently not come to pass until the architecture has first been integrated into business server systems and top-tier performance desktop computers.
Revealed in an official release on the company’s website, Pat Gelsinger, senior VP and GM of Digital Enterprise at Intel, offered that Nehalem technology will see the introduction of between two and eight separate processing cores on a single chip, which will mark a sizeable upward shift from the California-based chipmaker’s present Core 2 duo structuring.
According to Intel, Nehalem is “scalable with future versions having anywhere from 2 to 8 cores, with Simultaneous Multi-threading, resulting in 4 to 16 thread capability,” while the new micro-architecture will also deliver “4 times the memory bandwidth compared to today's highest-performance Intel Xeon processor-based systems.”
Nehalem will also offer users up to 8MB of L3 memory, 731 million transistors, Quickpath interconnects up to 25.6GB per second, an integrated memory controller and optional integrated graphics.
If that’s not enough temptation for laptop fans everywhere, then Intel is also keen to point out support for DDR3-800, 1066 and 1333 memory, SSE4.2 instructions, 32KB instruction cache, 32KB Data Cache, 256K L2 data and instruction low-latency cache per core and a 2-level Transition Lookaside Buffer (TLB) hierarchy.
The long and the short of Intel’s mollifying but well-oiled technical patter is that the rollout of Nehalem, and its eventual introduction into consumer laptop computers, is a mighty good thing that should lead to significant performance improvements across the board -- not to mention the appearance of a host of other computer products based on the capabilities of Intel’s newest architecture.
While exact laptop-related detailing remains somewhat patchy at this stage, an Intel spokesman has said the chipmaker will reveal more at April’s Developer Forum event in Shanghai, while Nehalem-based chips are expected to start appearing on the market before the close of the year.
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