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Nehalem has garnered quite a bit of attention from industry analysts since the first details were revealed, in 2007. This is because it's the first time in more than two decades that Intel has completely overhauled the way that data flows between different components on a chip. The overhaul is necessary because, as engineers add more cores to processors, bandwidth becomes a concern, and it becomes harder to prevent data bottlenecks from reducing performance. "It's a massive redesign," says Nathan Brookwood, founder of Insight64, an analyst firm. "It has tremendous implications for Intel and all of Intel's partners."
Prior to Nehalem, Intel chips had an external memory controller that moved information between the processing cores and the chips' memory, where frequently used data is stored. Because the controller was separate from the processors, several cores had to share bandwidth. By integrating the memory controllers into the processors, Nehalem has more than three times as much bandwidth. A similar approach was implemented by rival chip maker AMD in 2003, but Nehalem is Intel's first chip design with such a feature.
Another performance boost comes from the fact that each processor core can accept twice as much data using a feature called multi-threading. As long as software is written to exploit multi-threading, it can effectively transform a dual-core machine into a quad-core one.
Multi-threading is one of the features that will enable Nehalem machines to run more exciting applications. At IDF, Rick Willardson, Intel's product marketing engineer for desktop CPUs, showed off the winning entry in a contest to find the best new application for Nehalem--a program that quickly searches photo libraries using an original picture as the query. In the demo, Willardson searched for a picture of two kids on a beach towel with an American flag design using a picture of a flag found online. The demo machine took only a couple of seconds to find hundreds of matching images from a photo library.
Intel researchers have built a superfast silicon chip for optical networking.
Intel's new integrated power management could dramatically reduce power consumption in your laptop by shutting down operations not being used.
Spurred by competitor AMD's rapid success, Intel is shifting its strategy toward more power-efficient microprocessors.
Multithreading Is Not the Answer
From the article: Multi-threading is one of the features that will enable Nehalem machines to run more exciting applications.
Multithreading has been around for ages. It's a technological dinosaur. Intel, more than anybody else, knows that using multithreading to develop parallel programs is a monumental pain in the butt. For this reason, Nehalem will be on a fast lane to extinction as soon as it is released. There is an infinitely better way (see link below) to implement parallelism in a computer that does not involve the use of threads at all.
How to Solve the Parallel Programming Crisis:
http://rebelscience.blogspot.com/2008/07/how-to-solve-parallel-programming.html
The other commenter brought up a great point. Is this being put toward chip development for laptops? I remember Intel in the past putting out laptop specific chips, is this another attempt at that feature?
Brian Glassman
Commercialization
Innovation Management
With laptops, the CPU is not usually the biggest power draw. The hard drive, monitor, wireless card, CD reader, speakers -- all these eat up your battery life. However, the OS and installed software are important also.
Check out the One Laptop Per Child website to see how they manage to get their power use so low.
No, CPU is still most power hunger in laptops
todays new hard disks for laptops are under 6 watt per hour, RAMs are also lower power eater, LCDs, if you reduce the brightness, will use less that 15 watt,CD/DVD Roms are rarely used, so remain two: CPU and VGA ... even if u turn off Evil Aero in Devil Vista :-), just look at task manager, tab of Performance and CPU Usage section .. u just need to open a audio file or a movie or open more than 3 tabs in IE or Firefox to rise the percentage up to 30, 40 or 50, even it go up and come down rapidly, will kill your batt.
maybe I'm wrong but its what I've been observed in most of laptops.
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51 Comments
what about laptops
Quad cores lowering their power consumption from 100W is all fine and dandy for big server farms. But what about lowering the power draw in laptop computers that the rest of us use from 60W down to 5 watts or lower? Hey, I'd even consider running a little slower (I can't type or read that fast anyway) and dumping Vista for a smaller OS if required.
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