Posted on Tuesday, October 16 2007 @ 20:53 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
We're still waiting for Intel's 45nm processors but the upcoming Nehalem architecture also looks promising. According to Kirk Skaugen from Intel the jump from the current Core 2 architecture to Nehalem will be higher than the jump for Netburst to Core 2!
Since that last jump was pretty substantial - big enough to turn around the market situation and put AMD in a lot of further trouble, I'm curious how far would Nehalem go then.
If we compare the initial top Core 2 launch part, the 2.93GHz Conroe, vs 3.73GHz Presler, the last Netburst part in the same process, we're talking a speed increase between 30 per cent. And over 80 per cent right there and then, depending on what you run - I'm not counting some of those rare benchmarks where the difference was more than double.
Let's say, putting it conservatively, that the last extreme Penryn (Harpertown and Yorkfield) part is a 3.6GHz FSB1600 one in, say, April-May 2008, and that the first Nehalem, TylersburgDP platform, comes some two to three months later.
If it really provides a speed-up not even greater, but just similar to the 30-80 per cent jump seen above in the Presler-Conroe move, we'll have a speed champion on hand. Even the highest end Power6 parts, in DP configs at least, would have a bit of paranoia about this one. Just think the Harpertown benchmarks scaled to 3.6GHz, then multiplied by 1.3 to 1.8 depending on the case.
More info
at The Inq.
