Final WordsFirst keep in mind that these performance numbers are early, and they were run on a partly crippled, very early platform. With that preface, the fact that Nehalem is still able to post these 20 - 50% performance gains says only one thing about Intel's tick-tock cadence: they did it.We've been told to expect a 20 - 30% overall advantage over Penryn and it looks like Intel is on track to delivering just that in Q4. At 2.66GHz, Nehalem is already faster than the fastest 3.2GHz Penryns on the market today. At 3.2GHz, I'd feel comfortable calling it baby Skulltrail in all but the most heavily threaded benchmarks. This thing is fast and this is on a very early platform, keep in mind that Nehalem doesn't launch until Q4 of this year.Over six years ago I had dinner with Intel's Pat Gelsinger (back when he was Intel's CTO), and I asked him the same question I always do: "what are you excited about?" Back then his response was "threading", Intel was about to launch Hyper Threading and Pat was convinced that it was absolutely necessary for the future of microprocessors.It was at the same dinner that Pat mentioned Intel may do a chip with an integrated memory controller much like AMD, but that an IMC wouldn't solve the problem of idle execution units - only indirectly mitigate it. With Nehalem, Intel managed to combine both - and it only took 6 years to pull it off.Pat also brought up another very good point at that dinner. He turned to me and said that you can only integrate a memory controller once, what do you do next to improve performance? Intel has managed to keep increasing performance, but what I really want to see is what happens at the next tock. Intel proved its ability with Conroe and with Nehalem it shows that the tick-tock model can work, but more than anything looking at Nehalem today makes me excited at what Sandy Bridge will bring.The fact that we're able to see these sorts of performance improvements despite being faced with a dormant AMD says a lot. In many ways Intel is doing more to improve performance today than when AMD was on top during the Pentium 4 days.AMD never really caught up to the performance of Conroe, through some aggressive pricing we got competition in the low end but it could never touch the upper echelon of Core 2 performance. With Penryn, Intel widened the gap. And now with Nehalem it's going to be even tougher to envision a competitive high-end AMD CPU at the end of this year. 2009 should hold a new architecture for AMD, which is the only thing that could possibly come close to achieving competition here. It's months before Nehalem's launch and there's already no equal in sight, it will take far more than Phenom to make this thing sweat.
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The following is our summary of some of the characteristics of Nehalem.1. Based on the Intel Core microarchitecture2. The core of stars 2-8.3. Built-in three-channel DDR3 memory controller.4. The core of each exclusive 256KB secondary cache.5. 8 MB cache shared three.6. SSE 4.2 instruction set (a total of seven new instructions).7. Hyper-Threading Technology.8. Turbo mode (automatic overclocking).9. Optimized micro-architecture (to support 64-bit mode of macro integration, improve the data flow ring monitor performance data on the launch of the six ports, etc.)10. Pre-contracting unit to enhance performance, increase in the second branch of the cache sight.11. The second group of 512 road TLB.12. For the whole of the non-SSE instructions to enhance performance.13. Enhance the performance of virtual machine (based on the Intel official data showed, Nehalem relatively 65nm Core 2 in the virtual two-way potential at 60% of the upgrade, and the relative 45nm Core 2 products increased 20%)14. QPI new bus.15. New energy management unit.16. 45nm process, 32nm process, followed by product line, code-named Westmere.17. New 1366-pin interface.Nehalem has the equivalent of 65nm products following the most important new features.1. SSE4.1 instruction set (47 new SSE instructions).2. Deep sleep technology (C6-level sleep only in the mobile chip).3. Enhanced Intel Dynamic Acceleration Technology (only in the mobile chip).4. Fast Radix-16 divider and Super Shuffle engine, to enhance performance FPU5. Enhanced virtual technology, virtual machine interaction between the performance of 25% -75%.
Ha...they will keep dat...
