Intel Nehalem Really Impressive

Anandtech managed to get their hands on a Nehalem sample, the future evolution of Intel CPU to replace the current Penryn in couple of month. They run comparison test between a 4-core Nehalem clocked at 2.67GHz and a 4-core Penryn Core 2 at the same frequency. The Nehalem is respectively 28% and 44% faster for DivX and x264 encoding, and obtain a 24% higher score with Cinebench R10.
Such performance gain can be assigned to the new architecture but also to other improvement:
- For the first time in Intel CPU, the memory controller is integrated in the processor. As a consequence, the memory bandwidth is doubled when compared to the Core 2 Penryn, and the memory latency decreased by 40%
- The Nehalem support the Hyperthreading technology which allows creating 2 logic cores per physical core. One can then maximize the CPU load on each core.
- The Nehalem features a large L3 cache, while the cache L2 is now faster.
One should also mention that such test will also benefit from the SSE4 instruction set which are known to be highly optimized for each new processor for multimedia applications. On will have to wait for additional tests to better evaluate the real gain in everyday usage.
In summary, in couple of months, the first computer based on Nehalem should arrive, and we should experience the same boost in performance when we moved from Core to Core 2. Another reason for Pro users requiring huge raw crunching power to replace their hardware when those models will arrive.