Intel parades Xeon Nehalem boards at COMPUTEX

by Tarinder Sandhu on 5 June 2008, 17:06

Tags: Intel (NASDAQ:INTC)

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Intel's next-generation microarchitecture, currently known by the codename Nehalem, is due for public consumption later on this year.

The CPU giant has been engaging in a carefully-orchestrated release of technical tidbits, to keep the interest levels high, and, as such, was showcasing a number of Nehalem-supporting boards at its own stand at COMPUTEX 2008.


Intel's very own effort, Bluff Creek, utilises the Xeon Nehalem's flexible-channel memory-controller by having a total of seven DIMM slots.



Of the many others on display, the Gigabyte GA-7TESH-RH looked good, packing in a 2P solution with 12 DIMM slots and decent board layout.

It's strange to see Intel publicly showing motherboards supporting a processor that's still many months off, but there you go.

Incidentally, the same stand was chock-full of X58 chipset-based boards, too, and they support the desktop version of the Nehalem architecture.

Talk about letting the cat prematurely out of the bag, eh?


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Who would ever use 7 sticks of memory? Surely this is not for home use?
@ SiM: Being Xeon, those boards are server-based, so that's why they have the capacity to house so much memory.
It's strange to see Intel publicly showing motherboards supporting a processor that's still many months off, but there you go.

Incidentally, the same stand was chock-full of X58 chipset-based boards, too, and they support the desktop version of the Nehalem architecture.

Talk about letting the cat prematurely out of the bag, eh?

As someone who has been eagerly following Intel's developments, I don't think this is the case at all.

As Nehalem features a completely incompatible pinout to the old LGA776 used by P4 and Core 2, it has always been clear that the initial launch success of their new processor would be entirely dependant upon the market being geared up and ready with motherboards that can support it.

By displaying their readiness now, I suspect that Intel is hoping encourage system builders and the channel to hold back on new investment until they can have Nehalem systems. This will also help lower initial launch prices, by having a measure of certainly regarding sales, and hence the price point can be more easily geared towards making Nehalem a success (which will mean phasing our Core 2 as soon as possible).