Intel's Nehalem pixellated

DURING ROADMAP UPDATE, we managed to snag a pic of 45nm Nehalem, already packed for testing. Architecture was completed just a month ago, and lads recently got the silicon back.

Surprisingly enough, it ran Windows XP and Mac OS X without a hassle, which was demonstrated during keynote sessions. Good thing for debugging crowd was the fact that Nehalem was packed in bog standard 775 packaging, same one that Intel used for shipping hundreds of millions of processors to this date.

Who says Intel can't do native quad-core, integrated memory controller and multiple HT-like connections together with Hyper-Threading?

In his right had, Steve holds Nehalem, a native quad-core processor manufactured in 45nm, while his left hand is busy with Wolfdale, a dual-core member of Penryn 45nm family. Difference in die sizes is not as much as we thought, given the difference in number of cores and cache size.

Marchitectural overview of next generation 2S server/workstations and of course, 3rd generation V8 systems...

When it comes to backward compatibility, Intel's reps were quite cautious, since there is a lot of unknown things with this pup. From what we could conclude, compatibility with older chipsets is a pipe-dream, rather expect one generation backward compatibility and that's about that. In case of Nehalem, there is a pretty good chance that it will work with P35 and X38 generation of motherboards - once that desktop version gets its shape.

Still - that is one big die on socket 775, largest one we have seen from the Intel camp in quite some time. µ