Scared, what?
Intel scared of Nehalem?
Intel has officially acknowledged the existence of Nehalem, its next-generation microarchitecture, during several keynotes during this week's Intel Developer Forum Fall 2008. It's even been productised to Core i7, so it's real, very real.
However, as much time as Intel has put into disclosing what makes this particular core such an engineering leap forward over the present generation, hard-and-fast performance numbers have been difficult to come by - kind of surprising for a chip that launches in the next few months, right?
One would expect a class-leading architecture which will become the backbone of Intel's server, desktop and mobile parts for at least the next two years, to be heralded with the usual glut of 'oh-my-lord-it's-fast' benchmarks, suitably skewed (ahem, normalised) to AMD's fastest, thereby showing the delta that, Intel believes, exists between the semiconductor rivals' best.
So why no angelic trumpets and red-carpet treatment for a design that, on paper, takes present Core 2 (Penryn) to the cleaners in a number of memory-bandwidth and heavily-threaded instances?
Is it because of AMD?
Could it be that AMD's announcement that it will pull its next processor update, Shanghai, forward to Q4 2008 has Intel execs quaking in their expensive suits? We don't think so, because Shanghai's performance improvements over current-generation Barcelona are generally known, and it'll struggle to add more than 20 per cent extra oomph when evaluated on a clock-for-clock basis against Phenom X4. Knowing this, Shanghai will probably perform somewhat akin to Intel's Penryn.
Could the lack of numbers have something to do with Nehalem's performance not being quite up to scratch? That seems highly unlikely, especially if our Nehalem performance preview is accurate, and we have no reason to doubt that our 2D numbers will stack up against retail samples.
It's a question of economics, we reckon
Ultimately, we reckon that Nehalem performance has been deliberately kept under wraps by the powers that be. Why? Because letting a full suite of numbers out for public consumption, which has been Intel's method of disseminating its engineering excellence since first-generation Core microarchitecture hit AMD Athlon in the nuts, inextricably dampens - nay, crushes - sales of present-generation parts.
As a consumer or business, why would you buy a Core 2-based system when something potentially better, lots better, is just around the corner? - a product that will require a new motherboard and, potentially, new memory - kerching! Knowing just how much of a whipping Nehalem can potentially hand to Penryn in heavily-threaded scenarios, Intel would be driving potential customers away from mid-to-high-end sales of a chip that's been yielding well for some time. Cutting off your nose to spite your face comes to mind.
Intel is scared of Nehalem, insofar as its prodigious performance makes Intel's current line-up look, well, a little tardy by comparison, and why tell people that when there are millions of Core 2-equippe d machines waiting to be sold at the likes of PC World and Best Buy? Why spend $400 on a chip, or $2,000 on a system, now when the same money will buy you so much more performance in just three months?
Of course, after so little sleep during IDF, this particular hack could well be off his rocker. We'll let you decide.
