ANTenna Blog -- How-To

Right on the heels of the AMD Shanghai announcement, Intel brought out Nehalem—but so far it lives only on the desktop.

This week Intel brought out the first of its next-generation processor chips, the Core i7, using technology code-named Nehalem. Several vendors, such as Dell, immediately unveiled systems using it.

But Core i7 is aimed at the desktop, and the newly announced systems are desktops. But its Intel's Xeon processor that has been the traditional reliance of the x86 server market, and Xeons using Nehalem technology have yet to appear.

They'll be here -- the latest Intel processor roadmap indicates that at least some Nehalem features should be showing up in at least some Xeon processors by the end of this year. The switchover should be complete sometime next year. One news story specifically says that Intel will have Nehalem processors for servers in the first half of next year, and for mobile systems in the second half.

With Nehalem, each core can run two simultaneous threads, so that each core looks like two cores to the operating system. The memory controller no longer resides on a separate device. The Core i7 press release also speaks of a Turbo Boost facility that automatically adjusts the clock speed of one or more of the cores to help performance without increasing power consumption. Overall, with Nehalem, throughput is supposed to improve while power consumption is supposed to go down (as compared to the previous generation), but sources vary concerning exactly how much—and the amount will probably depend on circumstances anyway.

Similar features (except for dual-threading-per-core) are also present in the recently announced, latest generation of the AMD Opteron (code-named Shanghai.)

So server buyers who want the latest features can be patient, and wait for Nehalem to show up. Or they can switch to AMD, and perhaps boost its flagging market share.

(Nehalem, incidentally, is both a river and town in Oregon and an alternate name of the Tillamook tribe of Native Americans. Intel has traditionally used code names tied to the geography of the Pacific Northwest.)

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