Octa-core Nehalem in second half 2009

According to Fudzilla, Intel will be able to transit to an octa-core processor based on the Nehalem architecture in the second half of 2009 already. The head of Nehalem's development team, Ronan Singhal, reports that such a chip would be twice the size as a Core i7 with four cores, which will be released by the end of this year.

With its eight cores, the new processor will bear a TDP of about 150 Watt and the shared L3 cache would be much larger than the 8MB of the quadcore 'Bloomfield' processors. To keep the power consumption reasonable, Intel will decrease the frequencies in comparence to the quadcore models. Because of this, the processor seems most useful in workstations and servers, since most desktop applications perform better at a higher frequency than with additional cores. 

Nehalem architecture

Thanks to Hyperthreading, Nehalem's new octa-core will be able to process 16 threads simultaneously. It should become the successor of the recently introduced Dunnington, which is based on the 45nm Penryn architecture. 

Tags: corei7 nehalem

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