CPU
"Nehalem" Taped-out and Running Windows, Socket775 still goes strong
Intel’s largest architecture overhaul in decades is less than a year away, “Nehalem”, the next-gen 45nm native quad-core is still in Socket 775.
It wasn’t that long ago that predictions of doom and gloom pinned Intel between a rock and a hard place. The company’s NetBurst architecture didn’t scale and its Itanium architecture didn’t sell; it looked as if for the first time in history, Moore’s Law was in serious jeopardy.
The Gigahertz War has officially shifted to the Multi-core War. However, instead of fighting a pitch-battle the company will focus on improvements that allow multi-core systems to scale without forking development trees. Hinton emphasizes the company spent extensive resources improving single-thread performance, for example.
An integrated memory controller and new QuickPath interface will probably steal the limelight for these new single-thread improvements, but wait, there’s more.
Hyper-Threading will make its long awaited return with Nehalem, yet Hinton claims symmetrical multi-threading is a far cry from the Hyper-Threading found on NetBurst. Nehalem will allow the operating system to dynamically power down threads — so while an eight-core Nehalem processor will appear as 16 logical cores to the operating system, these threads can be powered down on-demand. 
Like AMD’s Barcelona architecture, Nehalem will allow the operating system to dynamically power and sleep other components of the processor including individual cores and cache components.
When it comes to backward compatibility, Intel’s reps were quite cautious, since there is a lot of unknown things with this pup. From what we could conclude, compatibility with older chipsets is a pipe-dream, rather expect one generation backward compatibility and that’s about that. In case of Nehalem, there is a pretty good chance that it will work with P35 and X38 generation of motherboards - once that desktop version gets its shape.
Source: DigitMemo
