I have to admit – I haven’t been following processor technologies as closely as I used to. Ever since Intel released the Core 2 micro-architecture, I’ve pretty much lost interest in CPU architectures. The world was going multi-core but really now.. what else was going on? Well if Intel stays on track with its development schedule, we’ll soon find out that the future is indeed bright when it comes to CPU architectures. Behold the upcoming Intel Nehalem architecture.

Those of you not familiar with Nehalem (such as I), should definitely give this article a read over, as well as the official Intel info page on the architecture. Let me try and summarize the major points of what is different about Nehalem.

Nehalem is designed from the ground up to the hafnium-based 45nm hi-k metal gate silicon technology developed at Intel. Smaller dies.. less heat.

Nehalem will have support for 2 to 8+ cores.. yes.. 8+ cores.. and on top of that, it can have up to 16+ threads with simultaneous multi-threading (or in Intel lingo – hyperthreading).

The architecture introduces Intel’s QuickPath technology which includes: a memory controller integrated into the processor die (a la AMD), high speed point-to-point interconnects, and dedicated memory for each processor (as well as shared memory). The platform will also support DDR3 memory as opposed to the current DDR2 memory for the Core 2 platform.

Nehalem will introduce new instructions into the mix with SSE4.2.

One of the first desktop processors to come out for the Nehalem micro-architecture is code-named “Bloomfield” and the folks at Maximum PC managed to build a system around a pre-production version. You can read more about the system at their website here.

Finally, a mobile version of Nehalem will be known as “Calpella” though there isn’t much else on that end of the spectrum.

In short, Intel is addressing some of the key weaknesses of the Core 2 architecture – primarily memory speeds. As the company continues to crank up processor speeds and add more cores to the mix, fast memory and fast interconnects become ever more important. Your processor might be fast on paper but if it can’t access data fast enough, then all the clock speed in the world won’t help you. Nehalem looks to change all of that.

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