Intel: 45-nm Nehalem in 2008

By Ann Steffora Mutschler, Senior Editor -- Electronic News, 3/29/2007

Chip giant Intel Corp. is doling out more details on its 45-nm-specific “Nehalem” microarchitecture, which the company said should go to production next year.

During a briefing Wednesday, Pat Gelsinger, VP and general manager of Intel’s digital enterprise group, said that by continuing to innovate at this pace, Intel expects to deliver enormous performance and energy efficiency gains in years to come with the addition of more performance features and capabilities for new and improved applications.

Specifically, the Nehalem architecture is dynamically scalable for high performance and energy efficiency thanks to a variety of features including dynamically managed cores, threads, cache, interfaces and power; four-instruction-issue Intel Core microarchitecture technology; simultaneous multi-threading, similar to Intel’s Hyper-threading technology that aims to give returns on performance and energy efficiency.

In addition, Nehalem contains new SSE4 and ATA instruction set architecture additions with multi-level shared cache that leverages Intel’s Smart Cache technology and improved system and memory bandwidth along with performance-enhanced dynamic power management, Gelsinger explained.

Nehalem was designed to be scalable for optimal price/performance/energy efficiency in each market segment it will be applied to, made possible by a new system architecture for next-generation Intel processors and platforms.

The architecture can be scaled up to 16 threads, up to eight cores with scalable cache sizes, as well as scalable and configurable system interconnects with integrated memory controllers and a high-performance integrated graphics engine.

Gelsinger said Nehalem and its previously discussed “Penryn” processors mark the next step in the company’s “tick-tock” product strategy that aims to deliver a new process technology with an enhanced microarchitecture or entirely new microarchitecture every year.

Penryn is on track for production in the second half of this year, he confirmed.

Both Nehalem and Penryn utilize Intel’s 45-nm Hi-k process technology with its hafnium-based high-k + metal gate transistor design, meant to allow higher performance and more energy-efficient processors.

Gelsinger noted that Intel has more than 15 45-nm Hi-k product designs in various stages of development, and will have two 45-nm manufacturing fabs in production by the end of the year, with a total of four in production by the second half of 2008.