With the launch and excitement of Intel's Silverthorne-based Atom processors behind it, Intel is turning its sights to the more salient and profitable next generation architecture for desktop, server, and mobile processors. Intel used the Spring IDF 2008 as a showcase for its Nehalem processor architecture.

Intel's Nehalem is truly a radical architecture departure from Intel thanks to its integrated memory controller which is called the QuickPath Interconnect. This serial bus is similar in nature to the HyperTransport which AMD has touted ever since the launch of its Opteron server processors. The QuickPath Interconnect will support triple-channel DDR3-1333 memory.

The first available Nehalem processors will be built on the existing 45nm manufacturing process, will incorporate SSE4 instructions, and will feature four fully integrated cores. Each core will have its own dedicated 256KB L2 cache and each core will share an 8MB of L3 cache pool.  The bulk of these 731 million transistor processors are dedicated to cache.

Event demonstrations at the Shanghai Intel Developer Forum, occurring now until the end of the week, show A1 silicon Bloomfield-based Nehalem processors at IDF at a speedy 3.2 GHz.

Like the 533 MHz variants of Intel's new Silverthorne-based Atom processors, Nehalem will also incorporate Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) which is also known as Hyper-Threading (HT). Each physical core in a single Nehalem processor is paired up with its own virtual core. As a result, the processor is treated as having eight threads/processors.

Intel senior vice president Patrick Gelsinger confirmed that Xeon MP versions of Nehalem will eventually incorporate eight cores per processor, one upping the current Penryn-derived Dunnington processor the company plans to announce later this year.  These octo-core Nehalem processors will also use the newest iteration of Hyper-Threading, bringing the total count to 16 threads per core.  And of course, these processors can be used in quad-socket configurations, bringing the processor market to 64 threads per mainboard.

Current Intel roadmaps peg the Nehalem launch date in Q4 2008, with a simulteanous rollout across servers and desktops. Since Nehalem uses a new architecture and transport bus, existing motherboards will not work with the new processors.