Intel's 45-nm Nehalem hits silicon, Otellini says 32-nm test chips in production

By Colleen Taylor, Contributing Editor -- Electronic News, 9/18/2007

SAN FRANCISCO -- At this morning's opening keynote at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF), Intel Corp. CEO Paul Otellini kicked off what the company said would be the "best IDF ever" with an announcement that Intel is indeed on track with its ambitious technology roadmap: The company has started production of its next-generation 45-nm Nehalem architecture that is slated to ship next year in configurations of up to eight cores.

"When Intel announces a new technology, you can count on the company to deliver," Otellini boasted.

As part of Intel's "tick-tock" timeframe, which alternately introduces a new process node and a new microarchitecture every two years, the new Nehalem architecture will debut in 2008, succeeding the scheduled  2007 launch of Intel's 45-nm Penryn silicon technology. 

Otellini confirmed today that Intel is currently in volume production of Penryn chips at two of its fabs, and that the 45-nm chips are set to ship to customers on November 12.  Two of Intel's factories, in Oregon and Arizona, are up and running with the production of 45-nm chips; the company's fabs in Israel and New Mexico are in line to begin 45-nm production within the coming weeks. Otellini said that the company will introduce 15 new 45-nm processors by year's end, and 20 more in Q1 2008.

Making good on Intel's tick-tock claims, Otellini said, three weeks ago Intel's Oregon-based engineering team completed the design process on the 45-nm Nehalem, and the company has commenced silicon production of the microarchitecture. In total, the eight core version of Nehalem architecture can be scaled to handle up to 16 threads. Nehalem, which Otellini briefly demonstrated running the Windows XP operating system during his speech, also includes switch on/off capabilities for its cores, caches, and threads; scalable and configurable system interconnects; an integrated DRAM memory controller; and a high-performance integrated graphics engine.

Both Nehalem and Penryn use Intel's 45-nm high-k process technology with its hafnium-based metal gate transistor design. According to Otellini, each Nehalem die has a whopping 731 million transistors.

Looking ahead further down the road, Otellini said that the company is now in production of 32-nm test chips, and showed the audience what he said was the world's first 300-nm wafer built on 32-nm process technology. Intel is set to debut 32-nm processors sometime in 2009.

For related IDF news, see "Intel pushes core arrays, WiMax."