Chipzilla Intel To Beat Rivals With Westmere

Worldwide microprocessor shipments fell significantly in the fourth quarter and are likely to decline further in the first half of this year says research firm IDC, In a bid to tackle recession and it’s rivals Intel is racing fast ahead with Nehalem and Westmere.

Nehalem code name for Intel’s new Core i7 is the tock of Intel’s tick-tock development cycle, if you don’t know intel follows tick-tock development cycle where in tick it moves on to a new process and in tock to a newer improved architecture and Core i7 is the latest microarchitecture from the company.

Some of the significant features of Core i7 are:

- Two, four, or eight cores, 731 million transistors for the quad core variant

- Integrated memory controller supporting two or three memory channels of DDR3 SDRAM or four FB-DIMM channels which offers three times the memory bandwidth of the previous dual channel controller at DDR3 1066 memory speeds

- Intel QuickPath Interconnect which replaces Intel’s frontside bus that exists on previous generation intel processors

- Simultaneous multithreading (SMT) by multiple cores and hyperthreading, which enables two threads per core. Simultaneous multithreading has not been present on a consumer desktop Intel processor since 2006 with the Pentium 4 and Pentium XE.

- 1.1x to 1.25x the single-threaded performance or 1.2x to 2x the multithreaded performance at the same power level

- 30 % lower power usage for the same performance

Core i7 is a major advance in processor making it more of a system on chip it is made in 45nm process. Core i7, released on November 15, 2008 in Tokyo and November 17, 2008 in the USA. The first computer to use Nehalem-based Xeon processors was the Mac Pro workstation announced on March 3, 2009. Nehalem-based Xeon EX processors for larger servers are expected in Q4 2009. Mobile Nehalem-based processors will follow in 2010.

Also Intel reportedly announced in february that it plans to accelerate its production of 32-nanometer processors and cancel some of its 45-nm integrated graphic chips in a bid to increase its lead over rival AMD and is now moving to westmere which is basically 32nm processor with Nehalem architecture. The first 32-nm chips will be in production later this year, including the dual-core chips codenamed Clarkdale and Arrandale and Intel is investing $7 Billion in manufacturing facilities in US for the same.

This move of Intel is a big punch in the face for AMD, though AMD released Phenom II to compete with Intel core i7, Phenom II is reportedly much inferior to Core i7 and AMD won’t have a desktop chip comparable to the 45-nm Core i7 until next year, and its 32-nm chips are not expected until 2011.

“By transitioning to 32 nm aggressively Intel is pressing its advantage competitively,” says IDC’s Rau. “Now instead of competing against AMD or others, Intel is effectively competing against itself and the market forces.” as quoted in Wired.