Nehalem Faster than Expected
Although we won’t see Intel’s Nehalem on the market until 2009, the guys over at AnandTech used their dark forces and got hold of not one, but two of Intel’s next-gen CPUs. As you might know by now, Nehalem will be featuring up to eight cores and will be capable of dealing with up to sixteen simultaneous threads, thanks to an improved version of the Hyperthreading architecture.
Unfortunately, Intel didn’t want Anandtech to fully assess the Nehalem CPU, sending some slightly-crippled components: the PCIe slot didn’t work, Intel have locked down the chips to less than their full performance, plus there were some other downgrades that affected the overall results. Anyway, the Anandtech team managed to run benchmarks on a 2.66GHz Nehalem CPU and it turned out that the system could perform pretty well, in spite of those downgrades.
The benchmarks results revealed total performance gains ranging from 20% all the way up to 50% over the current high-end Penryn CPU and that surprised the Anandtech teach: “We’ve been told to expect a 20 - 30% overall advantage over Penryn and it looks like Intel is on track to delivering just that in Q4. At 2.66GHz, Nehalem is already faster than the fastest 3.2GHz Penryns on the market today.”
The Anandtech team also measured the CPU’s power consumption, which turned out to be increased only by a small amount, but this could be further improved by launch time. Apparently, AMD is going to have a hard time once again.
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