Intel Unveils Future Processors for our Macs

During a recent conference, Intel unveiled some information related to its next generation CPUs.
The Peyrin, successor of the current Core 2 Duo, will be a minor evolution and the main new features will be:
- clock-speed higher than 3GHz
- 45nm engraving
- larger L2 cache: 6MB
- Improvement of some SSE instructions.
- Improved performance/watt ratio.
- Important increase of the FSB, 800MHz for the Peyrin notebook version and 1600MHz for the server Peyrin CPU (Mac Pro and Xserve?).
- Last but not least, the ability to overclock specifically one Core and not the other ones, to boost mono-threaded application, providing higher performance level without increasing power consumption.
Intel plans to improve performance by up to 20% and even 40% for video encoding thanks to a specific set of SSE4.
Later on, somewhere in 2009, the Nehalem, based on a new architecture will make its first steps:
- Nehalem CPU will be based on 8 Cores, and hyperthreading will make it possible to generate 16 logic Cores.
- All CPU cache will be shared between Cores to improve efficiency.
- Cores will be able to communicate directly with a Hypertansport-like system, avoiding using the bus (the G5 Quad Core was already using Hypertansport)
- The memory controller will also be shared
- There will be a power management system for each Core, making it easier and more specific to balance CPU loading.
- There will also be an option to include an integrated graphical unit in the processor, as AMD already planed to do it too.