Posted on Thursday, February 04 2010 @ 19:51 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
AnandTech reports Intel shared some new details about the power savings technology of Westmere, along with some talk of 4/6 core plans. You can check it out
over here.
We just recently met the first incarnation of Westmere - Clarkdale, the dual-core processor that’s been branded the Core i3 and Core i5. Later this quarter we’ll meet Gulftown, a six-core Westmere that’ll be sold under the Core i7 label. All of that is old news, now for the new stuff.
With Nehalem Intel started power gating parts of the chip. Stick a power gate transistor in front of the supply voltage to each core and you can effectively shut off power (including leakage power) to the core when it’s not in use. This was a huge step in increasing power efficiency, something that’s evident when you look at Nehalem idle power numbers..
