Intel's Gelsinger: Nehalem If You've Got 'Em

"We'll be filling out the rest of family in 2009," he added, standing under a projected slide featuring logos for a variety of Nehalem mobile, desktop and server devices.

Key changes from the Core design include integrated memory controller technology called QuickPath which replaces its Front Side Bus architecture, the return of Hyper Threading for eight-thread support on a quad-core product, and a new cache subsystem.

Another slide shown during Gelsinger's keynote confirmed what the earlier Intel presentation stated, that the chip giant is claiming its Quick Path memory controller architecture delivers up to 25.6Gbps of bandwidth per link on the Gainestown server chips.

Gelsinger and a succession of guests ran through other features of Nehalem. Perhaps the most exciting is Dynamic Power Management, which "dramatically reduces" power leakage thanks to a process advance and new integrated microcontroller. That technology also enables Nehalem's "Turbo Mode," which Gelsinger described as a process by which Intel is able "to take power savings and put it back into performance."

Other key Nehalem features are improvements to its virtualization capabilities such as Intel VT-d, a hardware improvement that directs assignments to Virtual Machines in place of software switches that previously directed that traffic, and the complementary Ibex Peak chipset reportedly due in the third quarter of 2009, which adds dynamic new remote system management capabilities to successful vPro commercial system platform.