In the chip business, you can never be too cheap, too fast or — increasingly — too green. This week, chipmaking giant Intel trickled out a few more details about how it plans to give us all of that and more. The company will deliver a slew of new chips over the next two years for desktop PCs and for servers.
In true technology industry fashion, that means a jumble of codenames such as Nehalem, Lynnfield and Havendale. Here’s a rundown of the new chips’ details, how they fit into Intel’s roadmap and when users can get their hands on them.
Most of Intel’s big guns are directed at increasing performance for server chips. But for desktop processors, the company has a new line called Core i7, which should be in production in the fourth quarter of 2008.
Intel’s upcoming releases are expected to also help it catch up with rival AMD on the server side of the business, says Jim McGregor, research director and principal analyst for In-Stat. "AMD continues to beat Intel in the server market," he says. "Nehalem represents the first time the two will almost be on par."
Intel’s announcements can be broadly categorized across three sets: Penryn, Nehalem and Itanium.
At its developer forum, the company offered more details on a number of its upcoming processors, with focus on better performance and lower power consumption.
Here’s a guide to how Intel has stacked its chips:
Penryn:
Last year, Intel introduced the 45-nanometer next generation Core 2 processor family, code named Penryn. The Penryn microarachitecture delivered more performance at the same clock speed compared to Core 2 duo processors and offered up to 20% performance improvement on tested games compared to the fastest dual core processors then.
Now Intel is ready to release the final member of the Penryn family, a 6-core server chip code named Dunnington. Dunnington has been shipped to Intel’s customers since July and it will be available next month to users.
Nehalem:
The star of Intel’s portfolio now will be Nehalem.
Nehalem is not just one product but the code name for a family of chips that will appear in desktops, servers and notebooks.
Intel says it is the biggest change the company has made to its chip architecture in a decade and the result will be chips that combine extremely high performance with higher energy efficiency.
The first set of Nehalem-based products to hit the market will be for the workstation and "extreme edition" desktops, with server chips to be introduced later.
Nehalem will have the 45-nanometer manufacturing process and use "hyper threading" technology that will give the chips the ability to execute 8 threads simultaneously on 4 processing cores.
Nehalem differs from earlier Intel architecture in that it uses QuickPath, which integrates a memory controller into each microprocessor and connects processors and other components with a new high-speed interconnect. QuickPath will replace Front Side Bus used in Xeon and Itanium platforms.
"As we make processors faster with more cores and threads, computation stops being a bottleneck," Rajesh Kumar, Intel fellow digital enterprise group said during a session explaining Nehalem at the company’s developer forum. "Getting to and from the memory system fast enough is the problem and the integrated memory controller on chip improves performance."
Intel says the increase in memory bandwidth in the Nehalem microarchitecture makes the system almost four to six times faster than it current platform. It also allows for very short latency, almost 40% better than current versions. (Latency is the lag time before a CPU can begin executing a given instruction.)
Nehalem’s power management features are also a big step forward. Nehalem’s power gates cuts off switching power to cores that are not being used, rather than just reducing the switching current in earlier versions. Leakage power that was residual in earlier versions, will also be shut off. Nehalem has a new power control unit, which is an integrated micro-controller, and has more than a million transistors.
Glen Yeung, a research analyst at Citigroup, believes Intel could price Nehalem at a 6% price premium to the current Core quad-core chips.
Among the first products to be available will be the Intel Core i7 processor for the desktop, followed by a variant for performance servers codenamed ‘Nehalem-EP‘. A derivative for the expandable sever market will be called ‘Nehalem-EX‘.
The first set of Nehalem-based chips will be in production in the fourth quarter.
Based on the Nehalem microarchitecture, Intel will also have the following products:
Havendale and Auburndale: processors with integrated graphics, for desktops and notebooks respectively.
Lynnfield and Clarksfield: processors that require discrete graphics (separate graphics cards), for desktop and notebook systems, respectively.
The four listed above are expected to be in production in the second half of 2009.
Intel also plans to have Westmere, a 32-nanometer version of Nehalem. Westmere will debut in 2010, Intel CEO Paul Otellini said earlier this year.
In terms of microarchitecture, Nehalem’s successor will be the 32-nanometer microarchitecture process called Sandy Bridge.
Itanium:
The latest chip in Intel’s Itanium family for server and high-performance computing systems, Tukwila, is expected to be delivered late this year to server makers. Systems using the chip will ship in late 2009.
Tukwila is a 65-nanometer chip and the first quad-core member of the Itanium product family. The processor has more than 2 billion transistors on it.
Tukwila will be followed by Poulson and Kittson.
Poulson will use a 32 nm process and is expected to feature either four or eight cores, better multithreading and is expected to ship in two years.
Intel has yet to reveal details about Kittson.
