Intel's First Nehalem Server Chips Set For Q4 Production

An Intel spokesperson did say Monday that a DP server chip would join the Extreme Core i7 as the devices "we will see first on Nehalem." The first Nehalem DP server product on Intel's roadmap is codenamed Gainestown and it's identified as a 45nm quad-core Xeon chip set for "volume ramp" in the first half of 2009 on the slide presentation obtained by ChannelWeb.

Features listed for Gainestown on a slide titled "What's Next For 2S Xeon?" include DDR3 memory, PCI Express Gen 2 support and shared L3 cache. Also new is SSE 4.2, which includes support for XML acceleration. The advantages over the Core architecture that Intel lists include improved power management, 33 percent more micro-operations over existing Penryn products for better parallelism, and enhanced algorithms and branch prediction capabilities.

Intel also says its Quick Path memory controller architecture delivers "up to 25.6Gb/sec" of bandwidth per link on Gainestown. The chip giant claims in its presentation that the unnumbered Xeon chip enjoys a 33 percent energy efficiency advantage over a presumably comparable Opteron processor from rival Advanced Micro Devices, due to more instructions per clock on the Intel product.

On the virtualization front, Intel says the VT FlexMigration technology it developed for moving virtual machines on older Core servers to the newer Penryn platforms carries over and is improved on Nehalem. VT FlexMigration eases the migration of Live VMs across Intel server generations, which in Intel's words "allows future platforms to be entered into the virtual infrastructure pool" by IT budget planners, one imagines.

Some other Gainestown specs named in various reports but not mentioned in the presentation are also believed to be applicable to all three Bloomfield, or Core i7, chips. Specifically, the Gainestown and Bloomfield chips will have a 130W thermal envelope (as will an eight-core Nehalem MP server chip called Beckton due in Q2 2009) and slot into Intel's upcoming Socket B, or LGA1366, superseding Socket T on motherboards.

Intel is set to discuss more Nehalem details at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) scheduled for Aug. 19-21 in San Francisco.

Joe Kovar contributed to this article.