<span class="content"> <p><font size="2">Two years ago in Taiwan at Computex 2006 Gary Key and I stayed up all night benchmarking the Core 2 Extreme X6800, the first Core micro-architecture (Conroe core) CPU we had laid our hands on. While Intel retroactively applied its tick-tock model to previous CPU generations, it was the Core micro-architecture and the Core 2 Duo in particular that kicked it all off. </font></p> <p><font size="2">At the end of last year we saw the first update to Core, the first post-Conroe &quot;tick&quot; if you will: Penryn. Penryn proved to be a nice upgrade to Conroe, reducing power consumption even further and giving a slight boost to performance. What Penryn didn't do however was shake the world the way Conroe did upon its launch in 2006.</font></p> <p><font size="2"><span class="content">After every tick however, comes a tock. While Penryn was a die shrink of an existing architecture, Nehalem is a brand new architecture built on the same 45nm process as Penryn. It's sort of a big deal, being the first tock after the incredibly successful Core 2 launch.</span></font></p> <p><font size="2"><span class="content">It's like clockwork with Intel; around six months before the release of a new processor, it's sent over to Intel's partners so they may begin developing motherboards for the chip. It was true with Northwood, Prescott, Conroe, Penryn and now Nehalem. And plus, did you really expect, on the eve of the two year anniversary of our first Core 2 preview, a trip to Taiwan for Computex without benchmarks of Nehalem? In the words of Balki Bartokomous, don't be ridiculous :)</span></font></p> <p><font size="2"><span class="content"> <p>Without Intel's approval, supervision, blessing or even desire - we went ahead and snagged us a Nehalem (actually, two) and spent some time with them. </p> <p>(Sorry guys, stop making interesting chips and we'll stop trying to get an early look at them :)...)</p> <a href="http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3326">Read more...</a><br /> <p> </p> <p><br /> </p> </span></font></p> <p><span class="content"><br /> </span></p> </span>

<br /> <strong>Today </strong>we had the chance to test one of the first available Atom desktop boards. While this is still a pre-production sample with an alpha BIOS, we could still run some benchmarks on it. We are sure that many of you are excited to see how this 4W TDP CPU actually performs.<br /> <br /> <a href="http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&amp;task=view&amp;id=7595&amp;Itemid=40">Read more...</a>

<span class="content"> <p><font size="2">The Atom processor's architecture is not about being the fastest, but being good enough for the tasks at hand. A product like ASUS' EeePC would not have existed 5 years ago, the base level of system performance simply wasn't great enough. These days, there's still a need for faster systems but there's also room for systems that aren't pushing the envelope but are fast enough for what they need to do. </font></p> <p><font size="2">The complexity of tasks like composing emails, web browsing and viewing documents is increasing, but not at the rate that CPU performance is. The fact that our hardware is so greatly outpacing the demands of some of our software leaves room for a new class of &quot;good enough&quot; hardware. So far we've seen a few companies, such as ASUS, take advantage of this trend but inevitably Intel would join the race.</font></p> <p><font size="2">One of my favorite movies as a kid was Back to the Future. I loved the first two movies, and naturally as a kid into video games, cars and technology my favorite was the second movie. In Back to the Future II our hero, Marty McFly, journeys to the future to stop his future son from getting thrown in jail and ruining the family. While in the future he foolishly purchases a sports almanac and attempts to take it back in time with him. The idea being that armed with knowledge from the future, he could make better (in this case, more profitable) decisions in the past. </font></p> <p><font size="2">I'll stop the analogy there because it ends up turning out horribly for Marty, but the last sentence sums up Intel's approach with the Atom processor. Imagine if Intel could go back and remake the original Pentium processor, with everything its engineers have learned in the past 15 years and build it on a very small, very cool 45nm manufacturing process. <strong>We've spent the past two decades worrying about building the fastest microprocessors, it turns out that now we're able to build some very impressive <em>fast enough</em> microprocessors.</strong></font></p> <p><span class="content"> <p><font size="2">In 1993, it took a great deal of work for Intel to cram 3.1 million transistors onto a near 300 mm^2 die to make the original Pentium processor. These days, Intel manufacturers millions of Core 2 Duo processors each made up of 410 million transistors (over 130 times the transistor count of the original Pentium) in an area around 1/3 the size.</font></p> <p><font size="2">Intel isn't stopping with Core 2, Nehalem will offer even greater performance and push transistor counts even further. By the end of the decade we'll be looking at over a billion transistors in desktop microprocessors. What's interesting however isn't just what Intel can do to push the envelope on the high end, but rather what Intel can now do with simpler designs on the low end.</font></p> <p><span class="content"><font size="2">With a 294 mm^2 die size, Intel could not manufacture the original Pentium for use in low cost devices however, today things are a bit different. Intel doesn't manufacture chips on a gigantic 0.80&micro;m process, we're at the beginnings of a transition to 45nm. If left unchanged, Intel could make the original Pentium on its latest 45nm process with a die size of less than 3 mm^2. Things get even more interesting if you consider that Intel has learned quite a bit in the past 15 years since the debut of the original Pentium. Imagine what it could do with a relatively simple x86 architecture now</font>.</span></p> <p><a href="http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3276">Read more</a><br /> </p> </span></p> </span>

<font size="2"><span class="content">Prior to its Intel Developer Forum, Intel is revealing a bit more detail on some new products coming down the pipeline - including Nehalem and Larrabee.<br /> <br /> <a href="http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3264">Read more...</a></span></font>