![]() At roughly 751 million transistors and a die area of 263 mm², though, the Nehalem EP is a much larger chip. Since this is Intel, that effort has benefited from world-class semiconductor fabrication capabilities in the form of Intel’s 45nm high-k/metal gate technology, the same process used to produce “Harpertown” Xeons. They attempted to create a solution that’s newer, better, and faster in most every way, melding the new system architecture with Intel’s best technologies, including a heavily tweaked version of the familiar Core microarchitecture. ![]() Those advantages look to be formidable because, to be fair, the Nehalem team set out to do quite a bit more than merely copy the Opteron’s basic formula. ![]() Just as with the Opteron, though, Nehalem’s true mission and raison d’etre is multi-socket systems, where its architectural advantages can really shine. Intel has been very forthcoming about its plans for Nehalem for some time now, and the high-end, single-socket desktop part based on this same silicon has been selling for months as the Core i7. Opteronian, to coin a word, but that’s also an apt description of Nehalem. Add in an integrated memory controller and a high-speed, low-latency socket interconnect. Try this on for size: a single-chip quad-core processor with a relatively small L2 cache dedicated to each core, backed up by larger 元 cache shared by all cores. Those barriers for the Xeon are about to be swept away by today’s introduction of new processors based on the chip code-named Nehalem, a new CPU design that brings with it a revised system architecture that will look very familiar to folks who know the Opteron. Even recently, while Intel’s potent Core microarchitecture has given it a lead in the majority of performance tests, Xeons have been somewhat hamstrung on two fronts: on the power-efficiency front by their prevailing use FB-DIMM type memory, and on the scalability front by the use of a front-side bus and a centralized memory controller. AMD’s decision to integrate a memory controller into its processors and use a narrow, high-speed interconnect between CPUs and I/O chips has made it a perennial contender in this space. Ever since the introduction of the first Opteron, Intel has faced a formidable foe in the x86 server and workstation markets.
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