Nick Race03 November 2008, 3:00 PM
This smoking new CPU from Intel does away with Frontside Bus altogether and brings a technology back from the dead.
Page 6 - One technology back from the dead, PLUS a doozy...
Nehalem sees the comeback of Hyperthreading in mainstream Intel processors. With Nehalem family processors having a real core count of 2-8 cores, Hyperthreading gives the processor an opportunity to execute two threads per core concurrently; meaning a thread count per processor from 4 to 16.
It does add performance to heavily threaded applications, which are becoming increasingly (but slowly) more common. Of course, assuming you're using a 4-core CPU, any application that doesn’t use at least five threads won’t see any advantages because of Hyperthreading -- four threads would be handled by the processor natively.
There's a list of heavily threaded commercial applications at the bottom of this article which will give a feel of what kinds of applications will be able to take advantage of Hyperthreading on the Bloomfield processor.
The doozy: three channel, DDR3 memory controller
The doozy, and a marked change from the way Intel’s processors have worked in the past is the integration of a memory controller directly into the processor package. Having the controller integrated allows for much faster communication with system memory and offers around 300% increased bandwidth between the processor and memory.
Nehalem processors all include a three channel integrated DDR3 memory controller, with support for two memory slots per channel for a total of up to six per processor. Intel’s X58 motherboard includes four memory slots, while the boards from other brands we’ve seen all include six.