The leaked slide deck also includes more information about Intel's Penryn successor, codenamed Nehalem. Nehalem is everything Penryn is -- 45nm, SSE4, quad-core -- and then some. For starters, Intel will abandon the front-side bus model in favor of QuickPath Interconnect; a serial bus similar to HyperTransport.
As noted by ZDNet blogger George Ou, the slides contain some rudimentry benchmarks for Nehalem and other publicly available processors. From this slide deck, Ou estimates Nehalem's SPEC*fp_rate_base2006 at 163 and the SPEC*int_rate_base2006 at 176. By contrast, Intel's fastest Harpertown Xeon X5482 pulls a measly 80 and 122 SPEC fp and int rate_base2006.
According to Ou's extrapolated data, Intel expects a 2.8GHz Shanghai processor from AMD to have an int_rate score of 121 and an fp_rate score of 123, both higher than the respective 80 and 122 scores of its 3.2GHz quad-core Xeon X5482. However, Ou says Intel also expects a Nehalem chip with undisclosed specifications to score 176 in int_rate and 163 in fp_rate, wiping the floor with the Shanghai part. Intel's slide doesn't say how fast it actually runs, though.
The Nehalem processor more than doubles the floating point performance of its current Penryn-family processors. Ou adds, "We’ll most likely know by the end of this year what the actual scores are, but I doubt they will be more than 5% to 10% off from these estimated projections."
Originally Posted by Shintai
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