Intel's Nehalem simply sizzles

ntel's new Nehalem Xeon CPUs, which are being introduced in countless one- and two-socket servers and workstations today, have already generated a lot of heat. While introducing the new processors to technical journalists in February, Nick Knupffer, Intel's global communications manager, boasted that "Nehalem represents the biggest performance jump we've made since the introduction of the Pentium Pro."

This claim was met with outright skepticism by nearly everyone in the room, and certainly by me. But after running a two-socket, eight-core Nehalem system in my lab for the past few weeks, it would appear that Knupffer is right. Intel has built a better mousetrap. And it used part of AMD's blueprints to do it.

[ Intel or AMD? See "Where does Nehalem get its juice?," "Intel engineers stage CPU coup," "AMD's six-shooter is loaded and ready," and "AMD spins Moore's Law in IT's favor." ]

Back when AMD's Opteron was ruling the performance roost, Intel was busy gluing two separate cores onto a single die and calling it a dual-core CPU. Memory bandwidth lagged due to the central off-die memory controller, and while the overall performance of the processor was acceptable, it lacked the NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) punch that was the Opteron's claim to fame. Nehalem is based on a NUMA architecture, much like the Opteron, and its performance is miles ahead of anything else Intel has released to date. Color me impressed.

Inside Nehalem
The Nehalem chips (Xeon 3500 series for single socket and Xeon 5500 series for two-socket systems) feature a quad-core layout with 731 million transistors, 256KB of L2 cache per core, 8MB of L3 cache, deeper and faster caching, and better branch prediction. Essentially, Nehalem is a blend of the strengths of Intel's legacy Xeon processors with a fundamental architecture change in the incorporation of NUMA.

Tags: Intel, Nehalem, Xeon

next ›
1234
Related Content...

* More Functionality, Less Infrastructure:Managed IT with netBoot/i | White paper
* Protecting Sharepoint with Double-Take for Windows 5.0 | White paper
* LIVEWIRE™: Full-Server Protection and Recovery in Real-Time | White paper
* Intel's Nehalem EP server chips hit the market | Article
* Intel may not ship Nehalem EX until early 2010 | Article
* Nehalem, and all that comes after | Blog
* Atom netbook chip propels Intel to top of market | Article

Sign In or Register to comment

* JBoss CTO leaving the company
* Ruby on Rails 2.3 offered
* IBM leading Open Cloud Manifesto charge
* You don't know tech: The InfoWorld news quiz

More Functionality, Less Infrastructure:Managed IT with netBoot/i
* Protecting Sharepoint with Double-Take for Windows 5.0 | White Paper →
* Achieving Business Agility with Application Grid | White Paper →
* Application Infrastructure at Enterprise Organizations | White Paper →
* Achieving the Impossible: Unlimited Application Scalability | White Paper →
* Better Manage your Wireless Devices | Webcast →

See all White Papers / Webcasts

Sign up to receive Infoworld Resource Alerts
Subscribe to the Technology: Hardware Newsletter

The one-stop resource center for IT professionals.

Controlling DC Brush Motors with H-bridge Driver ICs
In this paper, The reader will be introduced to ROHM’s unique product family which...

Flash File Systems Overview
Flash memory is a non-volatile memory, which allows the user to electrically program (write) and...

Focused Cooling Using Cold Aisle Containment
A number of options are available to facilities professionals looking to improve cooling efficiency...
See all IT Whitepapers

PHP Developer
Buffalo, NY Synacor
Unix Systems Administrator
Boston, MA Large Financial Technology Firm
Software Quality Assurance Representa...
Houston, TX cPanel Inc.
Senior Developer
Buffalo, NY Synacor
Instructional Designer
State College, PA Penn State
More Jobs / Post A Job