Intel’s Nehalem Takes Center Stage at IDF

SAN FRANCISCO – Intel Tuesday offered a look inside its next
generation of processors, the Nehalem family, with new details and
demos during the Intel Developer Forum (IDF). Nehalem was the code name for the processor, which Intel recently dubbed officially as the Core i7.

The Penryn family of processors fades into the sunset with Dunnington,
the six-core Xeon server processor that Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) began
shipping to OEM partners in July. It will appear in systems in
September. The official product name is Xeon 7400.

Penryn is certainly going out in a big way. Pat Gelsinger, senior
vice president and general manager of the Digital Enterprise group,
showed some record high benchmarks, including the first TPCC benchmark

to break the one million mark for transaction processing. An IBM eight-socket server scored 1.2 million in a TPC-C benchmark, a means of measuring server performance by measuring how many online transactions can be performed in a set period.

Gelsinger also discussed the improved virtualization technology in
Nehalem. One of the major problems for virtual environments is the bottleneck of I/O, which consumes a lot of CPU power as the CPU plays traffic cop. Nehalem addressed this with VT-d, a direct path to the hardware that lets the virtualization software share physical devices directly, reducing CPU overhead.

Power management on Nehalem will be better than today’s systems because the
old gate technology that attempted to shut off unused cores was
lacking. It didn’t address voltage leak, which is the main cause of
power drain.

Nehalem’s Integrated Power Gate technology will take voltage down
to zero when the core is idle. A “power switch” was built into the
chip silicon to handle this. Each core is handled independently,
similar to AMD’s Phenom and Quad Core Opteron. Gelsinger noted that
the one million transistors in the Integrated Power Gate “is
more than my 486!”

Intel did disclose one major new customer: NASA. The Ames Research
Center in Mountain View, Calif., has begun construction of a massive
supercomputer based on Itanium chips called Pleiades.
At the time of the announcement, NASA was unsure if it would use Nehalem,
but Gelsinger said the chip would be used to build out what will be a
one petaflop supercomputer. The Nehalem architecture is not planned for Itanium, but NASA has said the Pleiades supercomputer could handle a mix of processors.

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