Intel Demos 3.2GHz Nehalem at Shanghai IDF

[Rob Williams]

From our front-page news:

The Intel Developer Forum is the place to be to get sneak-peeks of what Intel has up their sleeves, but that's a given. IDF in Shanghai is taking place right now, and Intel has wasted no time in breaking out the Nehalem and impressive specs.

The demo chip was running at 3.2GHz, on par with the current QX9770 and QX9775 processors, but it's uncertain whether it will be a launch frequency or not. However, Intel does release higher-clocked products with any new launch, so if such high clocks on the new architecture are stable, then it might very well be 3.2GHz that we see.

Unsure what Nehalem even is? Then you need to check out our reports from a few weeks back, where we explained that architecture along with Dunnington, Tukwila and others. With Nehalem at the stage it is now, I cannot wait to see what's unveiled at the next IDF in August.


The first available Nehalem processors will be built on the existing 45nm manufacturing process, will incorporate SSE4 instructions, and will feature four fully integrated cores. Each core will have its own dedicated 256KB L2 cache and each core will share an 8MB of L3 cache pool. The bulk of these 731 million transistor processors are dedicated to cache.

Source: DailyTech

This is one launch I cannot wait for... it seems like such a leap for Intel. They might copy AMD in a lot of regards here, but Intel's processors are faster, and with Intel's extra architecture upgrades, Nehalem is going to be fun to test and read about.

[Merlin]

Oh YEah....Love to see a review of this one.
Oh course I'm CPU poor now....lol
Be a while till I do any upgrades.

Merlin
On vacation 4-13 @ home

[Kougar]

Yeah, its going to be amazing... unfortunately we now know for sure current CPU coolers and CPU waterblocks don't have a snowball's chance in hell of fitting on Nehalem chips. The LGA1366 socket is just way way to massive and has been elongated, so even if the mounting holes were similar the heatspreader is much much larger now.

[Rob Williams]

Originally Posted by Kougar

Yeah, its going to be amazing... unfortunately we now know for sure current CPU coolers and CPU waterblocks don't have a snowball's chance in hell of fitting on Nehalem chips. The LGA1366 socket is just way way to massive and has been elongated, so even if the mounting holes were similar the heatspreader is much much larger now.

You raise a good point... older CPU coolers couldn't be used. It's kind of unfortunate, but this is quite a leap in CPU architecture, so it's understandable that in order to fit in all the new goodies, the CPU and socket had to increase in size.

I just hope that cooling companies will have plenty of new products available in time for release (and that Intel sends them along guidelines early so that they can make it happen).

[Kougar]

I hope the same, but I am not counting on it. Doubly so with waterblocks, as they need to modify the base of their coolers.

Having almost 2x the heatspreader surface area may be a good thing to mitigate the extra heat (And I am very sure Nehalem will be a hot chip for several specific reasons), but it also means it will take new baseplate designs along with new mounting bracket designs...

Could also wonder how many more heatpipes they might use too, since they can squeeze in many more than currently possible now...

INQ released this, check out that industrial strength socket http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquir...es-nehalem-cpu

[Merlin]

Originally Posted by Kougar

I hope the same, but I am not counting on it. Doubly so with waterblocks, as they need to modify the base of their coolers.

My what a big CPU......
You could mod a cooler, but that footprint is huge.
Maybe even two cooler on that big boy

Merlin

[Rob Williams]

I might be blind, but from those pictures, the CPU looks to be a similar size to what we see right now. It's just the socket that's increased in size.

[Kougar]

Actually, someone corrected me on another forum. The Socket 423 Pentium 4 was bigger! Do keep in mind that Nehalem is no longer a square processor, one side has been elongated just slightly. It doesn't show very well in those photos. Intel processors up to thie point were always a square package.

This is the size of the processor package, not the socket:

LGA 775 = 37.5 x 37.5mm
LGA 1366 = 42.5 x 45mm
Socket 423 = 53 x 53mm
Socket 478 = 35 x 35mm

[CoolZone]

I guess this will be one EXPENSIVE CPU

[Kougar]

Expensive, maybe a little. Hot, definitely yes. Nehalem is 731M transistors... Quad Penryn was ~820M transistors, so total count actually went down. This is because Intel traded 4mb less L2 cache for more useful stuff, like triple channel memory controllers.

Silicon size doesn't reflect on the package size, or vice versa. More than likely the die size will be the same as Penryn.

Originally Posted by Techgage

While Core CPUs had a die size of 143mm^2, Penryn will be 107mm^2.

[Rob Williams]

Hot is right... good thing it's starting off with a 45nm process. I still can't wait, though. I think it's going to be one of the most exciting CPU architecture launches in quite a while.

[Kougar]

I'm on water, a little heat doesn't scare me as long as it's due to blistering performance. GT200+Nehalem may strain my watercooling loop though, I was waiting for a new GPU before I bought a GPU block... so I've never really come close to stressing the loop before.

Anyway, SMT made Northwood+Prescott rather hot, and that was to run 1 core with 2 threads. Nehalem will be 4 cores with 8 threads, so I honestly expect Nehalem to be an extremely hot cookie when running 8 threads. From what I've seen each core requires 2-thred SMT transistors, so that would be 4x the SMT logic of Northwood... if true, ya see where I'm going with this! Three memory controllers won't help either.

If it lives up to expectations I'll be springing for the expensive LGA1366 version... there are so many disadvantages to the LGA1160 that there may be a very real reason for the "extreme" chip next go around... Not sure if that is a good thing or bad though.