Yes it’s that time of the year again - IDF time that is. Not familiar with the term? IDF stands for Intel Developer Forum and this is when developers (and apparently press) come together to hear what’s coming down the road from Intel. It’s a good deal of marketing hype combined with some low level developer sessions. It’s funny how IDF has changed over the years. I remember my first IDF conference way back in 1997 when Intel was still a small 80,000 person company (Ha..). Back before blogs, before Twitter.. the only people who really cared about IDF were in fact the developers - both hardware and software. Yes, there was a good deal of marketing mumbo jumbo too but heck.. it was still a great way to meet other engineers in the field (and yes.. it was a great time to get away from work and party it up with fellow Intel engineers. Yes.. Geeks Partying away!). Ok.. enough of my walk down memory lane.. here’s some of the big juicy tidbits from IDF.
First off, on the processor side of things, Intel will be releasing several new processors during the last four months of this year. Thanks to this News.com posting, I’ll try and highlight some of the major details.
On the nettop/netbook front, Intel plans on releasing a dual Core Atom processor targeting the nettop market. This new Atom processor will have a slightly higher thermal envelope than current generation Atom processors (which are single core yet have hyper-threading).
On the server front, Intel will be releasing a new six core Penryn based processor code-named Dunnington. Not much else on this one..
The majority of the details were focused of course on Nehalem which Intel will begin releasing during the fourth quarter of this year. The company released additional information regarding Nehalem including:
- Nehalem comes with a “Turbo mode” which is a power management feature that allows unused idle processing cores to be powered down for power conservation. More on Turbo mode below (and why it’s called Turbo mode). This will be available in both Nehalem-based notebooks/laptops and servers.
- Turbo Mode is based possible thanks to an integrated microcontroller which handles the core power management
- Nehalem-EX is an 8 core Nehalem chip (which was showed off at IDF)
- Nehalem-EP (Efficient Performance) is a quad-core chip for servers and workstations
- Intel Core i7 is for the desktop market (I never did talk about the i7 naming announcement.. but I’m sure all of you know this already). As is standard for current Core processors, there will be desktop ones as well as Extreme processors for those who need that extra umph for the desktop.
Intel also announced that they are planning to integrate graphics directly into the main processor chip. Future processors without integrated on-die graphics will include Lynnfield and Clarksfield while Havendale and Auburndale will have integrated on-die graphics.
ExtremeTech has an excellent article detailing low level architectural details of Nehalem that were announced by Intel at IDF. Here are the major highlights:
- Think of Nehalem as two pieces - the “core” and the “uncore”. The core contains all the computational units as well as the caches (L1 and L2). The uncore contains all the communication interconnects - things like the integrated memory controlls, the QuickPath links, L3 cache etc.
- Turbo mode as mentioned above is part of Nehalem’s ability to be “dynamically scalable” - basically deliver the performance when it’s needed and power down cores when it’s not needed. Note also that Turbo Mode also means that when cores are powered down, more power can be given to the cores that are available which means cores can actually scale up in clock frequency (hence the Turbo mode)
- Nehalem will have three caches (L1 to L3). Each core will have an L1 and L2 cache. L1 is a split cache - 32KB for instruction and 32KB for data. L2 is a 256KB unified cache. L3 cache is shared and much much larger (8MB on desktop Core i7 versions)
- Of course, we all know there’s an integrated memory controller too. The controller will operate synchronously with the CPU now
- Nehalem comes with a high speed point-to-point interconnect called QuickPath which connects CPUs to each other, CPUs to memory, and CPUs to I/O hubs (the southbridge).
- Finally, don’t forget that Hyper-threading is rearing it’s head again in Nehalem. A quad core Nehalem can actually have 8 threaded performance with Hyper-threading (2 threads per core).
As you can see, things are certainly getting exciting when it comes to Intel processors. There’s a lot coming down the pipe and it’s actually getting me pumped up about building a new computer again. It’s ironic considering I decided to opt for pre-built computers last year. I’m still envisioning an 8 core Nehalem system running Media Center at home. Yum.
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