Intel's Nehalem roadmap through 2010

Written by IT News on 3:14 PM

It seems that a few more pieces of info on Intel's roadmap for the 2008-2010 time frames has been leaked to the Web, and although not yet officially defined as precisely, some sites have already jumped on to publish articles on the subject. Looking at the chip manufacturer already confirmed plans, the leaked information appears to be reliable enough, at least for what Intel has in mind right now, but no one can safely say the changes do not appear in the future.

An article published by PCWatch earlier showed a number of charts presented some Nehalem breakdowns, and those who are interested in making a comparison between Lynnfield, Havendale, Westmere and Bloomfield can look at them here. The graph that we added to this article provides more information on Intel's road map for 2010 and some specs on Atomic processor.

Intel has already begun the strong value of shares on the market and E7300 (2.6GHz Wolfdale, 3MB L2) is one of them, even if it seems that its projection of "Essential" is not too accurate. Q4 out to put Bloomfield for "Mainstream 3", and this will be the only Nehalem to start until Q2/Q3 2009, when a full-flavoured Core i7 range is expected to crack. The Core 2 will be moved to "Value 2" area at the time. The Core 2 Duo technology seems to go into the Celeron-segment after that, and Nehalem line will cover all other areas. The new Atomic processors for launch in Q3 2008 are also included in the graph.

According to the table, the first half of 2010 will bring the six-core Westmere for high-end segment of the market. The chip manufacturer seems to be planning push of quad-core and hexa-core processors in the broad market, although there are some programs that would support this number of processors.

The Atom-330 will be launched in the coming weeks, while the Atom-230 is already here. The new chips should arrive in 2009, but it remains to be seen whether Intel will have a single-core released before the dual-core model. The road map that shows changes in the CPU's platform and an integrated GPU core, but it is still unclear whether the GPU core will be integrated into Atom or company will go to a multi-die package.

Apparently, the new processors will also feature an integrated memory controller, given that the boards are using DMI and not the norm FSB. The chip manufacturer is suspected of choosing to use an MCM package for Pinefield, with the CPU IMC on one die, and GPU core on the other. The MCH and ICH are connected via the DMI link, which makes the FSB-term unusable.

Hopefully, Atomic will have a friendlier desktop chip, which will also match their energy consumption. Currently, both the Atom and the next 230 to 330 Atom work with quite old 945GC platform, which needs more energy to operate than the Atom himself. The new processors will probably have higher clock speeds as well.

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