Intel’s next leap: 32nm Westmere ‘system on a chip’ arrives

The centrepiece of today’s massive microprocessor launch for Intel – easily the biggest launch in the company’s 40-odd year history – is the debut of its new Westmere architecture.

Every one of the 17 new processors in the Core family is built using the ‘system on a chip’ or SoC technology which bakes the processor, graphics and memory controller into a single package (codenamed Clarkdale for desktops and Arrandale for notebooks).

Westmere’s dual-core processor shrinks from the 45nm scale of Nehalem down to 32nm – making it the  ‘tick’ in Intel’s tick-tock cadence – with the smaller geometry making for greater efficiencies in the performance-vs-power ratio.

Initial benchmarking of the new Arrandale mobile processors by Anandtech, which compares the mid-range Core-i5 540M processor to the Core 2 Duo P8700 clocking at the same 2.53GHz speed (although the i5-540M can turbo-boost itself to 3.06GHz) shows performance gains of between 11% for basic productivity to almost 30% for 3D rendering.

Even single-threaded apps (for which Anandtech uses Cinebench R10) reveals how the dual-core four-thread processor still shows a clean pair of heels to its Core 2 Duo counterpart with a 38.4% boost, which edges to 43.5% when multithreading is called for.

Video encoding is another serous win for Westmere, where the Core i5 stole a 36% lead on the Core 2 Duo.

All this comes with in a chip with the same power drain as the previous generation, and in many cases a lower cost to the notebook manufacturer – something Intel says is possible because of Westmere’s  simplified two-chip design, which does away with the southbridge hub by shifting IO into the new Series 5 chipsets.

This ‘repartitioning’ of the Nehalem design into a single uber-chip includes vastly enhanced graphics from the integrated 45nm graphics core which is wire-bonded to the processor core.

This not only speeds the data flow between the two engines (and does away with the front-side bus completely, replacing it with Intel’s DMI pipeline to the chipset), it permits a similar clock frequency ‘turbo boost’ to the dual-core processor.

Anandtech’s first tests using World of Warcraft running at the lowest quality settings in 800 x 600 mode saw the frame rate rocket from 19.1 frames per second with the Core 2 Duo to 43.8 fps with the Core i5.

Despite their many advances, Westmere-class processors will exist side by side with the Core i7 and Core i5 Nehalem chips in the early stages because currently only the Nehalem processors are quad-core.

So while the Core i3 processor is exclusive to Westmere, for the time being you’ll see Core i5 and Core i7 chips built on both platforms.

Next on the roadmap is Sandy Bridge, which is expected to debut by the end of this year and will shift the 32nm process to an all-new microarchitecture design.

A year later will see Sandy Bridge processors shrink to a 22nm process codenamed Ivy Bridge, which is tipped to bring quad-core into the entry level with eight cores at the performance end of the spectrum. A native 22nm architecture dubbed Haswell is slated for 2013, and then it’s on to 16nm by 2015.

(By this stage it’ll be ‘last drinks’ for the silicon processor, with Intel CEO Paul Otellini saying that Intel has a new and “very cool” base material lined up to replace silicon by 2017 – possibly a new  ‘compound semiconductor’ named indium antimonide, which clocks at 1.5x the speed of silicon transistors while drawing one-tenth of the power).