Those upcoming crazy fast Intel Nahalem chips we’ve profiled a bunch of times this year got an official name today, and in typical Intel fashion the subdued moniker does little to betray the speedy goodness housed within. The chip set will be called Core i7 in its first generation of products, and is also the first of Intel’s processors to sport all four cores on a single piece of silicon. A black label version called the Extreme Edition will arrive alongside the standard i7, and will be geared more toward the high end market. [CNET]
The Intel platform in notebooks hitting shelves at this moment is Montevina, the first to go by the Centrino 2 moniker. Though it’s fresh out the door, Digitimes supposedly has some details on Calpella, the one that’ll follow it next summer.
Intel’s first Nehalem-based processor, Bloomfield, was originally set to launch in December, but Digitimes says these little demons will actually come out in September, hitting shelves in early October. Why the excitement? Nehalem is a brand new microarchitecture, replacing the Core one we’re all familiar with. (Penryn was a shrink of Core, to make it more energy efficient.) Anandtech has a nice preview of Nehalem. To give you a taste, even on a “partly crippled, very early” platform, Nehalem smoked Penryn by 20-50 percent, while using only 10 percent more power. Yeah. [Digitimes]
Sure, Nvidia’s crashing into the mobile market Intel wants to dominate. And Intel is running into discrete graphics (not to mention ruling with integrated graphics). But you know, it’s friendly right? Wrong. It’s total war. Nvidia’s continuing to hold out licensing SLI support for Intel’s boards, notably its next-gen Tylersburg chipset for the Nehalem CPUs. And Intel hasn’t yet licensed Nvidia to make an nForce chipset that’ll support Nehalem, citing a “disagreement” over the terms. If they don’t make nice, gamers will have to pick between having SLI or the latest and greatest Intel processors, meaning they get screwed either way. Man, where’s AMD when you need them? [Maximum PC]
The pair of 45nm Intel chips that Sun oh-so-kindly leaked last month just got all official-like. Dunnington is “the first IA (Intel Architecture) processor with 6-cores, is based on the 45nm high-k process technology, and has large shared caches.” Six cores, exciting! But not as exciting as Nehalem, which is Intel’s “dynamically scalable” new processor microarchitecture which’ll bring “dramatic performance and energy improvements” to Intel’s chips. And that means what?
According to the chaps at the Eclipse Developer’s Journal (EDJ), Intel is planning a six-core microprocessor, which will go by the Dunnington moniker.
