Intel's Pat Gelsinger on Monday officially unveiled the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip giant's latest microprocessor advance, the new microarchitecture codenamed Nehalem. The Nehalem die, pictured here, features integrated memory controllers -- visible at the very top of this quad-core chip -- eliminating the Front Side Bus on Intel's current Core architecture. Nehalem client processors have been branded "Core i7," while upcoming server chips will retain the Xeon brand name, Intel confirmed at IDF.
Intel says it will ramp production of both its first Core i7 chip, a 3.2GHz, quad-core "Extreme Edition" desktop processor, and a DP Xeon featuring the Nehalem microarchitecture before the year is out. Gelsinger, GM of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, served up a few specifics about Nehalem during his IDF keynote -- perhaps the most exciting of which is Dynamic Power Management, which "dramatically reduces" power leakage thanks to a process advance and new integrated microcontroller, and which 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."
