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QUICKSTART^
THE BEGINNING OF THE MAGAZINE, WHERE ARTICLES ARE SMALL
QUICKSTART^THE BEGINNING OF THE MAGAZINE, WHERE ARTICLES ARE SMALLA
t the end of The Godfather, Michael
Corleone settles all of the family busi-
ness. In some ways, Intel’s road map
for the next two years may have a similar
impact on the companies it has warred with.
AMD? If Nehalem performs as expected, it
will likely be the bada bing for AMD’s Phenom
CPU, which already lags behind Intel’s existing
Core 2 chips. And then there’s Nvidia, which
lately has been like a rock in Intel’s shoe. Will
Intel’s Larrabee graphics turn the GeForce into
the proverbial Moe Green?
Indeed, it’s easy to imagine a major
shakeup in the works given the revolution-
ary changes afoot in Intel’s approach to
processors and graphics. Nehalem, after all,
finally does away with the much criticized
front-side bus design. Since the Pentium,
Intel has connected its CPUs to the chipset
on the motherboard via a shared front-side
bus. The design has carried over to Intel’s
dual- and quad-core procs, increasing the
traffic on the front-side bus and the theoreti-
cal potential for a slowdown.
Nehalem adopts an AMD-like design, in
which each core will feature a high-speed
interconnect called QuickPath to com-
municate with other cores. Nehalem also
moves the memory controller directly to the
CPU. Each Nehalem CPU will support up
to three channels of DDR3 and be a native
quad-core design—all four cores on a single
die. Nehalem also brings back an improvedform of Hyper-Threading by allowing each
core to process two threads at once. With
the threading, a single Nehalem would ap-
pear to the OS as an eight-core CPU while
a dual-CPU rig would have 16 theoretical
cores available. Addressing the criticismthat Hyper-Threading was responsible for
occasional performance hits, Intel says it has
enlarged the cache and memory bandwidth
in Nehalem to mitigate those issues.
According to Intel, Nehalem is also de-
signed to be fairly modular, so the company
could easily build a quad core today or an octo
core version when needed. The on-die memory
controller can also be easily
substituted for, say, a DDR4 or
XDR interface if need be.
Performance numbers
aren’t available, but Intel
demonstrated working
hardware to the media this
spring and said an official release is on tap
for later this year.
As part of its one-two PR punch, Intel also
talked up its secret Larrabee project, fi nally
confi rming it would be a discrete graphics
card. Larrabee will feature multiple minicores in the GPU that can be used to process
graphics. One key difference between Larra-
bee and the graphics parts from Nvidia and
AMD is that Larrabee will be rooted in the
x86 instruction set. Intel says this was done
to make it easier for developers to program
for the new GPU. The company maintains
that one of the problems with Nvidia’s CUDA
and AMD’s GPGPU is the difficulty in pro-
gramming for them. Intel’s strong developer
tools and familiarity with x86 programming
would thus be a tremendous advantage.
Of course, that’s all theoretical. The first
Larrabee cards are more than a year and
a half away, which gives Nvidia and AMD
time to respond. Intel also has a history of
fumbling in graphics. When it last tried to
take on graphics in the late 1990s with the
i740 and i752, it badly foundered against
the nimbler and more aggressive graphics
companies—one of which was Nvidia.Nehalem will be Intel’s fi rst native quad-core design and will be built on a 45nm process.THE NEWS
Next-gen CPU will feature a revolutionary break from the past and look
more like an Athlon 64 than a Pentium —GORDON MAH UNG
Intel Outs Nehalem
THE NEWS
Intel Outs Nehalem
THE NEWS
WILL INTEL’S LARRABEE
DISCRETE GRAPHICS TURN
GEFORCE INTO THE PROVERBIAL
MOE GREEN?