Making its way around the Internet late last week was speculation of the official name for Intel’s future processor microarchitecture, currently codenamed Nehalem.

If the rumors are to be correct, the Intel Core i7 and Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition processors will officially be announced August 11 with an expected launch date of Q4 2008.

Nahalem is expected to be initially manufactured with a 45nm process and be available with two, four, or eight cores, for up to 731 million transistors in the quad core variant. A very exciting aspect of the new architecture is the new integrated memory controller, called the Intel QuickPath Interconnect, with DDR3 SDRAM support, which will eliminate the bottleneck that was the front side bus and which had been haunting Intel for years. This should result in a substantial performance increase despite Intel’s competition, AMD, having been using an integrated memory controller in their processors for years.........Continue reading