It has now been almost 2 years since Intel launched its newest micro architecture and that means we’ll see the next step in Intel’s product cycle within the near future. The people over at Intel have a habit of releasing a completely new architecture every other year and this is the case now as well. During Computex 2006 the Conroe architecture showed up and Anandtech even managed to get hold of a preview on the at the time very fresh, and still not launched architecture.
The results were mighty impressive and we have since then seen how both the Core Duo and the Cure 2 Duo families have taken Intel to new heights the last years. Now it is time for another Computex and Anandtech has once again been able to get hold of processors based on Intel’s next-gen micro architecture, what makes the whole thing even better is that Nehalem looks to be as impressive as Conroe was at its launch.
Despite that both the processor and especially chipset/motherboards are still in development, the Nehalem architecture shows mightily impressive performance. Penryn which is the updated version of Conroe (45nm) and moreover without doubt the fastest processor architecture on the PC market sees itself beaten in more or less all the tests. Nehalem gives with its revised cache design and integrated memory controller (the first CPU with an integrated memory controller from Intel) 20-50% better performance compared to Penryn at the same clock frequency.
This is pretty astonishing by a platform which is not being launched until a couple of months and it really makes us look forward to the autumn this year. Much can happen until then, but we can be pretty sure about two things; Nehalem won’t get worse, and AMD’s uphill is only getting steeper and longer.
