More Details on Nehalem

IDF SPRING 2007After grabbing Dileep Bhandarker, Director of Advanced Architectures for Intel’s Digital Enterprise Group and sitting down for a quick chat with bit-tech about Nehalem we managed to get a hold of a few more details:

• It will use a new socket but its form factor and pin count is undecided at the moment.
  
• Consumer level CPUs will still use standard DDR3 and the controller is just another evolution of what is on the northbridge now, but obviously it'll be extremely low latency when its on Nehalem's die. The CPU is capable of both FBDIMM and DDR3 access depending on if it’s used for a server or consumer application.
  
• The interconnect between other processors in an MP system will be a serial derivative of PCI-Express, as will the interconnect to the I/O Hub. No details are available as yet as to whether the next generation I/O Hubs will be single chip or a northbridge-southbridge chipset solution, although nothing is ruled out.
  
• The integrated graphics will be DirectX 10 and offer GPGPU functions if the software used is able to address it -- Intel is currently working to make the software available.
  
• Intel is basing the graphics core on a derivative of Intel Architecture (IA) that it uses on its CPUs since the general purpose processing now done on a unified shader GPU core is very similar to that of a CPU. Intel says it’s capable of not only DX10 but OpenGL and GPGPU as well, although performance information isn’t yet available, but expect it to be still quite basic compared to a discrete solution.

That's all for now, maybe IDF in the autumn will offer some more insights into Nehalem.

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