Intel gives sneak peek at Nehalem microarchitecture

The chip that will make other chips cry, apparently.

Hyping up its 'coming soon' Nehalem chips, Intel will put out a paper today giving an up-close-and-personal look at the nuts and bolts of Nehalem’s microarchitecture.

The paper, 'Next Generation Intel Micro-architecture (Nehalem) Clocking Architecture,' is set to be released today, the third day of the VLSI Symposia which runs until tomorrow evening.

At a press briefing, Intel Fellow and director of Circuit and Low Power Technologies, Rajesh Kumar, noted that the paper dwelt in particular on two of Nehalem’s special features; the integrated memory controller and the feature which allowed processors to connect to another component or another chip on the motherboard, dubbed Quickpath.

Kumar noted that, "the path to memory and the path to the chip are all integrated into the CPU itself," claiming the reason for this was to squeeze as much lower latency to memory as possible and achieve significantly higher bandwidth to memory. "The numbers we are going to achieve with Nehalem are 25GB per second for socket-to-socket communication and 32GB per second for going to main memory", he boasted, reckoning that this made Nehalem three times faster than its competition (notably AMD).

Because Nehalem architecture will be bunged into servers, desktops and notebooks, Intel engineers apparently had to figure out the best way the chip’s structure could be adapted for each. This was done by making the processing cores modular, enabling the cores to be switched out in relatively simple fashion.

Also, for maximum energy efficiency, Intel’s boffins purportedly decoupled main components, so voltage and clock frequencies of various bits could be set separately.

Kumar explained, "The CPU core, for example, can be running at its own frequency and voltage while the memory system is running on its own and I/O is running on its own and each of them can be tuned for a different segment."

Another energy-saving facet of the design, outlined by Kumar, is that Nehalem will supposedly be able to self regulate according to the type of applications running on a system, thereby changing its frequency to suit its power needs for various bits of software.

Kumar confirmed that Nehalem would indeed allow Intel to integrate a graphics core into the processor, a challenge to Intel's main rivals, who have long overshadowed the firm when it comes to graphics.

Desktops sporting the new Nehalem processors are supposed to be making their first appearances towards the end of 2008, and several more chips based on Nehalem microarchitecture are set for their debut in early 2009. More details about what Intel believes will be the highest-performing x86 chip in history are set to be unveiled in August at the firm’s development forum.