HIGH-END LAPTOPS and desktops could become faster and more power-efficient when Intel releases CPUs that are built around its new Nehalem micro architecture late this year. Initially the company will target the chips, to be called Core i7, at power desktops and workstations, but scaled-down versions will eventually appear for consumer desktops and laptops; they will be upgrades from Intel's current Core 2 chips. Nehalem is supposed to eliminate bottlenecks found in Intel's earlier Core micro
architecture, thereby improving system speed and per-watt performance. "Nehalem is going to be about more performance, and people always want more performance," Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight 64, notes.



Down the line, Intel will integrate graphics capabilities with the CPU. That strategy should bring more power efficiency, particularly to laptops, since as a result an integrated graphics chip set will no longer be necessary. However, garners will still need a discrete graphics card to achieve the best graphics performance. "If you look at what Intel is doing towards desktops and laptops chips by integrating graphics, that could very well reduce power consumption," Brookwood says.

Nehalem chips will still carry the Core brand name, but Intel will omit the numeric reference to 2 for its mainstream desktops and laptops. "The Core i7 brand is the first of several new identifiers," says Intel spokesperson George Alfs. Packing between two and eight processor cores, the first Nehalem chips will include QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) technology, which integrates a memory controller and provides a faster pipeline for the CPU to communicate with system components such as the graphics card and other chips. Each core will be able to execute two sofrware threads at a time-so a desktop with four processor cores, for example, could run eight threads simultaneously for quicker application performance.