Nehalem Has a Turbo Mode

Chris Moody — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 12:54:56 -0500

At yesterday’s Intel Developer Forum keynote, Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group discussed new features of the company's next-generation processor family including a new turbo mode. This turbo mode shifts the processor into a higher gear for ‘mind-blowing performance’ without a heat penalty.

On Nehalem based CPUs, Intel has introduced a technology that it calls ‘power gating’. Basically, when one or more of the cores on a Nehalem chip are not in use and powered down, the processor can divert power to the cores that are running by increasing their voltage and clockspeed.

"Our engineers have put together an incredible processing family here that will include a tremendous amount of new processor features all centered on delivering faster computer performance and terrific energy efficiency," Gelsinger said.

This next-generation Core microarchitecture features Intel Hyper-Threading Technology delivering up to 8-threaded performance capability on 4 cores in the initial versions. Nehalem is predicted to offer more cores in future versions. It also contains the much vaunted new QuickPath Interconnect. QuickPath is a technology that connects processors, chipsets and memory together, and delivers up to three times the memory bandwidth of previous generation processors.

It is no wonder that when Gordon Mah Ung did his sneak peek of Nehalem, it was so impressive. I want mine yesterday, please.

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Nehalem Has a Turbo Mode