Intel Next-Gen CPU Has Memory Controller and GPU

Many readers wrote in with news of Intel's revelations yesterday about its upcoming Penryn and Nehalem cores. Information has been trickling out about Penryn, but the big news concerns Nehalem — the "tock" to Penryn's "tick." Nehalem will be a scalable architecture with some products having on-board memory controller, "on-package" GPU, and up to 16 threads per chip. From Ars Technica's coverage: "...Intel's Pat Gelsinger also made a number of high-level disclosures about the successor to Penryn, the 45nm Nehalem core. Unlike Penryn, which is a shrink/derivative of Core 2 Duo (Merom), Nehalem is architected from the ground up for 45nm. This is a major new design, and Gelsinger revealed some truly tantalizing details about it. Nehalem has its roots in the four-issue Core 2 Duo architecture, but the direction that it will take Intel is apparent in Gelsinger's insistence that, 'we view Nehalem as the first true dynamically scalable microarchitecture.' What Gelsinger means by this is that Nehalem is not only designed to take Intel up to eight cores on a single die, but those cores are meant to be mixed and matched with varied amounts of cache and different features in order to produce processors that are tailored to specific market segments." More details, including Intel's slideware, appear at PC Perspectives and HotHardware.

Comments

Re:Is AMD beaten?

[Fordiman]

I do. I feel that AMD should stop beating itself and get back to beating Intel!

No, seriously, though. I'm holding out on the hope that AMD's licensing of ZRAM will be able to keep them in the game.

Re:Is AMD beaten?

[vivaoporto]

I agree. Despite of the fact of AMD market share growing in the past 3 years, the most recent products coming from AMD are headed to beat the AMD ones, unless AMD takes a shift in the current direction and starts to follow AMD example. Nowadays, when I order my processors from my retailer, I always ask for AMD first, and only if the AMD price is significantly lower, I order AMD. I remember back in the days when you could only buy AMD processors, while now you can choose between AMD and AMD (and some other minor producers), isn't competition marvelous?

From your truly,

Marklar

Penryn and Nehalem?

[j00r0m4nc3r]

I can't wait for the Frodo and Samwise chips

Re:So, basically...

[maxwell demon]

If you do the same thing as everyone else but do it better, you don't have to come up with anything new. What new things do you really want in a CPU? The dwim instruction.