Ladies and Gentleman, the Nehalem's existence confirms what Intel engineers knew about since the Prescott but didn't want to admit it at the time. Silicon is running out of steam and the days of rapid clockspeed progression are over. There are buying some time by throwing cores at the problem. They are going to hit some other interesting limits with silicon as the gains from die shrinking keep diminishing.There is only so many tricks that you can do to increase IPC. Parallelism has its own limits.

I honestly doubt that the mainstream market even needs 8-cores or will ever find a use. It is difficult enough to get programmers to code programs to be multi-threaded and efficient with two-cores.

There is lot more to Nehalem die than what meets the eye. I suspect that not all of those eight cores are actually general purpose. However, time and Intel will tell.

BTW, I think Shintei, Progesterone, Porkster and tombguy had a collective eorgaism. ;)

I wonder how many geeks out there are saving that image and just zooming in out of curiosity.

/guilty

Can XP actually address 8 cores, let alone 16 logical CPUs? I know it can work with two dual-core processors for 4 functioning cores, and I presume 8 cores if you had two quad-core.

It seems strange that Windows actually counts how many physical processors are in a machine, how does it know the difference between 2, 4, or 8 physical CPUs and one CPU with multiple cores? Particularly with Intel chips which are on a single shared bus (or two lately). Do multiple cores all share a common address or something which Windows just counts as 1?

Oh I reread. In its "largest" configuration. So they may not have been demoing an octo-core there.

Dumb question: why are those things always cut round instead of square?

boring...we dont need cores..we need gigahurts !!!

That's a little over 200 cores he's holding up there. Or, depending on when you price them, $50,000 - $100,000 worth of chips. Would make a very expensive mousepad. :-)

This better be a big improvement over Netburst hyperthreading which was rarely beneficial and often slowed down some tasks.

At 4 cores this will require a minimum of 5 threads to show an improvement in theory. In practice, with task swapping between processing, I can't help think this is something that causes more hassle than benefit. 4 real cores is likely plenty for a while until software catches up. Which I think will take some serious time.

I thought hyperthreading was bad for performance?

The Emperor's voice just popped into my head...something about a fully functional battle station!

AMD just wet its pants.

I wonder if 8 cores is the best interconnect geometry for internal "quick" links.

SMT = simultaneous multithreading

No AMD toast?

This is a huge announcement. AMD better have an 8 core MCM in the works.

I'm not skeptical about the science, but I'm skeptical about real-world performance. The scientific principles of NetBurst, even in the improved Prescott core, were sound but in reality performance just didn't put out.

I suppose i should start saving for one!

be able to execute two threads via Symmetric Multithreading (SMT)—a la HyperTransport.

I'm sorry, but I think you mean Hyper Threading.....