Intel at it Again!

A few days back I wrote an abridged history of the CPU, spotlighting Intel and AMD in their never ending battle for supremacy. Today, one of my favorite technical/review sites (AnandTech) snagged an early revision of the Nehalem architecture (Intel’s next big chip) and ran a few benchmarks. AMD must feel crushed, because Intel pulled out ALL the stops.
Nehalem chips wont be available to consumers until then end of 2008 and beginning of 2009. They offer as many as 8 cores, each ‘HyperThreaded” (a technology used in Intel’s older Pentium 4 chips) to create twice as many logical (processing capable, virtual) cores. The biggest, baddest consumer Core 2 available today comes with a maximum of 4 cores. Testing one of the 4 Core 2.66GHz Nehalem CPUs against one of Intel’s 4 Core 2.66GHz Penryns (updated Core 2 ‘Conroe’), the Nehalem still put the hurt on Penryn on a clock for clock basis. In other words, even at the same “GHz” the Nehalem is much faster.

Nehalem at Computex 2008 in Taipei, China.

To quote Anand himself, “First keep in mind that these performance numbers are early, and they were run on a partly crippled, very early platform. With that preface, the fact that Nehalem is still able to post these 20 – 50% performance gains says only one thing about Intel’s tick-tock cadence: they did it.”