Nehalem Thus Far

Intel’s Nehalem microarchitecture has been living in the lap of luxury since November of last year when the first three processors of the Intel Core i7 line were released. At that time we saw the Core i7-965 Extreme Edition, i7-940 and i7-920 brought to market with a few motherboards based on the brand new Intel X58 chipset. Performance was outstanding but prices were high, especially when including the motherboard and triple-channel memory requirement. I won’t dive too far into the architecture design on the Intel Core i7 quad-core processors, but there are a few key features that make the Core i7 unique in comparison to the Core 2 line. Though the core itself shares a lot of the logical design with the Core 2 parts, the Core i7 saw performance enhancements thanks both to the introduction of the “uncore” and the reintroduction of HyperThreading to allow for two active threads on each core. The “uncore” portion of the Core i7 includes an on-board memory controller, the first triple channel solution, the QPI (Quick Path Interconnect) link to the chipset and other CPUs in multi-socket systems, power management and more. Another boon for Core i7 performance is a feature called Turbo Mode that allows the frequency of the CPU to scale higher when thermals allow. This essentially allowed the processor to run at higher with single or double threaded software while maintaining good performance for more heavily threaded applications.