Sun Leaks Intel Nehalem Performance Info

by Marco Chiappetta — Monday, February 25, 2008, 04:00 PM EDT

Intel has been slowly serving up information regarding the company’s upcoming Nehalem microarchitecture for many months now. In our sneak peek at Nehalem and Intel’s 45nm High-K article from way back in March of last year, we outlined many of the details regarding Nehalem, but unfortunately we did not have any projected performance numbers to disclose. Some news broke today, however, regarding a PDF that was inadvertently leaked by Sun Microsystems that not only mentions Nehalem, but has some performance data listed as well.

“So how can Intel pull off such a massive performance boost over their current reigning champion “Harpertown” X5482 processor? Consider the fact that Intel’s current generation 45nm Harpertown processors lead the benchmarks despite the memory bandwidth disadvantage because of a much faster execution engine and larger cache. Then we factor in the fact that Intel will implement SMT (dual threads per CPU core), improve the already-fast execution engine of Harpertown, and feed it with three channels of DDR3 memory per CPU instead of the old shared front side bus.”

George Ou of ZDNet has taken the data and extrapolated expected benchmark results. They show Nehalem handily outpacing all other configurations, including a 2.8GHz Shanghai-based AMD CPU.

Tags: Intel, Nehalem, Sun, HAL, performance, rf, leak, RMA, EA, leaks, K

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com