Friday, July 17, 2009

Intel's roadmap details upcoming Nehalem CPUs

A roadmap showing upcoming mobile and desktop processors based on Intel's Nehalem architecture has been leaked to Japanese site PC Watch. Although some of the information was already available through earlier leaks and rumors based on anonymous inside sources, the roadmap extends into the second part of 2010 and shows a number of previously unmentioned chips in various price segments and with different capabilities.

On the mobile front, for example, the three Core i7 Clarksfield processors that wererecently rumored for September are said to carry 8MB of cache on all but the slowest model and will apparently have plenty of headroom for increased clock speeds. Specifically, the 1.6GHz Core i7 720QM should scale up to 2.8GHz; the 1.73GHz 820QM up to 3.06GHz; and the 2GHz 920XM to 3.2GHz. The speed bumps will come through Turbo Boost, a feature that allows active cores to clock themselves up or down in steps of 133MHz as needed, as long as the CPU's predetermined thermal and electrical requirements are still met.

The quad-core Clarksfield parts should cost between $340 and $1,000 and will be joined in early 2010 by Arrandale dual-core chips, drawing 18W to 35W, as well as Intel’s Atom / Pineview series on the value end.

On the desktop side, two of the first Lynnfield processors to debut in Q3 2009 will be branded the Core i7 860 (2.83 to 3.46GHz) and Core i7 870 (2.93 to 3.6GHz), with the former getting a less power hungry version next year. Core i5 will refer to Lynnfield chips with quad cores, Turbo Boost and no Hyper-Threading; and will also debut in Q3 2009 as the 750 part clocked between 2.66 and 3.2GHz.