Processor Leap Frog

By Doug Barney

A couple weeks ago AMD announced a ground breaking quad core processor for servers. Intel Corp. of Santa Clara, CA, doesn’t take these announcements lightly, and wasted no time cranking up its PR machine, and spitting back. The Intel Developer Forum was Intel’s opportunity to try and regain the upper hand.

Intel’s biggest announcement was Nehalem (a river in Oregon, not to be confused with the Nephilim of the Old Testament). Nehalem is a new processor architecture, set to ship next year, and was built with many cores in mind. The demo last week was of quad cores, but the real plan is to support eight cores by the end of next year. Nehalem is also more efficient in how it talks to other processors and memory.

Intel is also managing to squeeze more and more juice into smaller and smaller space. Intel honcho Paul Otellini announced plans for 32 nanometer chips. To most of us 32 nm means nothing until Intel tells us that 4 million 32 nm transistors “could fit on the period at the end of this sentence.” And you thought they had me at hello.

Do you care who makes your processor? If so, what is your favorite processor or processor vendor (I have a soft spot for the old Motorola 68000 family myself as you’ll see in our next item).

http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20070918corp_a.htm