Did the thought that Atom + Larabee as a 'coprocessor' could be a heck of a low power draw but perfectly capable platform for light tasks which are typical for the majority of users, along with enough grunt for things like HD acceleration cross anyone else's mind?

Decreasing total on-chip cache from Penryn -> Nehalem seems like a perfectly logical move. They did move RAM much closer to the cores, remember? :).
AVX sounds cool, but I'd like a period of ISA-stability after that :), to get chips/compilers/developers to catch up with eachother.

3 things I want to point out/add:

1) Nehalem needs to come with DDR2 support. I think it would be a mistake not to.

2) x64 is fun and you will all soon be forced to find out why (4Gb+ is fun, come join the party)

3) Why no mention that Nehalem will be on TWO sockets? The "high-end" tri-channel LGA1366 and the "performance" dual-channel LGA1160. Not all Nehalems will have tri-channel support.

FYI: http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=551931

30 to 40 % faster clock for clock than Penryn,and probably won't cost more than $300 for a really fast one that overclocks like hell anyway.
Good times indeed for Intel fans.

In teory sounds great but practical not sure.
P4 was great on paper , 3GHz and HT (2 threads ), after comes Pentium D great 2 cores X 3GHz excelent product :))
And Barcelona the same , "native" quad, k10, and a lot of innovetions ... :))) great product =))
will Nehalem be a "great" probuct?
PS the smoler cache suggest theat curent 12MB is to much?
remimenber theat the 45nm quads are not in store .( so a simple change from 65nm in 45nm is a problem ) good luck with the integreted contoler and grafic core.

Using current 2GB DDR3-1333 modules, that means you'd be able to cram 18GB of RAM into a single desktop PC

There isn't enough copper on the planet for that much DIMM.

Let's hope it would do well for Folding.

The day intel comes out with a usable graphics solution is the day I'll eat the Eiffel tower.

ddr2 support on nehalem would be sweet.

I'm intrigued by several things in this post, but the main one that keeps trumping all others is a design issue. With the addition of a three-channel memory controller motherboard manufacturers will have a very obvious way to differentiate their boards.

I could see some companies configuring "mainstream" boards with dual channel memory (4 slots) and the higher-end parts with triple channel (6 slots), but there's also the possibility of mainstream triple-channel boards with only three slots, all of which would need to be filled to get the available bandwidth, and budget boards still with just two slots...

I'm very curious to see what transpires there. Going back to three DIMM slots, like the 440BX boards of yester-yore, would feel odd. But so would having six slots. And then there will be companies selling 6GB (3x2GB) DDR3 kits and the like...

This odd number, why does it fascinate me so?

Also, Larrabee sounds... interesting. Looking forward to seeing how that turns out, just because more competition is always good.

Dunnington is interesting. When the Sun slides leaked I was trying to imagine how they'd get the L3 into an MCM with 3 CPUs and extract decent performance from it. I'm still surprised it's monolithic, though.

Three channels of DDR on the desktop Nehalem part is a surprise too (perhaps it's a time-to-market thing, and we'll see cut-down "celeron" versions later). And three modules per channel? Weird.

That large shared L3 and smaller L2 looks better tuned to server loads, but we're at the point of diminishing returns for most desktop apps anyway. All in all it looks like a monster server chip (8 threads, loads of bandwidth); it will be interesting to see how many sockets Quickpath can scale up to.

2 things come to mind.

1. Get the CPU tread mill running.

2. Intel is holding back progress again with only 6 cores.

I wonder how 256KB of L2 will fair for each core, even when tied to a substantial L3. And Larrabee is shaping up to be a fantastic product if it will be able to run current games at acceptable frame rates when it's launched.

"Gelsinger describes Nehalem's simultaneous multi-threading implementation as "similar in many ways" to Hyper-Transport, but he says performance will be "much improved" compared to old Netburst chips, partly thanks to the upcoming CPU's increased bandwidth."
Hyper-Transport or Hyper-Threading? Sounds like that should be hyper-threading.

Better get your stomach in a stretchy mode by next year: when Intel sets its sights on something, they tend to bury the competition.

AMD and Nvidia will still have a leg up against Intel, but Intel will quickly gain on them in the OEM space. Nvidia will hurt the most in this situation, they don't have an x86 chip. AMD will be ok when Intel gets in the race, but now have a lot to fear once Intel jumps in.