Computex 2008: Intel shows next-gen Nehalem processor and Intel SSD

Posted at: 4:43am 3rd June 2008 by Clive Webster in Taipei

We've seen both in action, and can't wait to get them in the Labs for testing.

We saw a fully operational Nehalem PC today at Computex. Nehalem, for those not in the know, is Intel's successor processor architecture to its current Penryn CPUs which will be a radical change from previous designs. The Nehalem architecture has an integrated memory controller - a design concept first introduced by AMD in the Opteron and Athlon 64 to great effect.

The good news is that Intel's quick demonstration of Nehalem was just that - quick. We saw video being encoded at a very rapid rate, with all eight cores of the Nehalem system (housed in a very smart-looking Origen S21T case) rendering efficiently. However, the application used isn't one we have much familiarity with, and Intel was being incredibly coy about what exactly was going on inside the swanky Origen case.

Intel wouldn't be drawn on the clock speed of the Nehalem CPU. While Francois Piednoel, Intel Senior Performance Analyst, freely admitted that he had overclocked the CPU, he wouldn't tell us by how much, not even in percentage terms. The coyness of Intel does little to quash the rumours that Nehalem will be tricky to overclock, which you can read on Fudzilla. However, we agree with Nordic Hardware that Intel implementing an overclocking lock of this type (or any type) is highly unlikely.

Also on show was Intel's own SSD (Solid State Disk), although we doubt it was using the 4GB SSD chips we reported on recently. The Intel SSD was only an engineering sample and, like so many other SSD we've seen, was a 2.5in S-ATA drive. However, unlike some SSD manufacturers, such as Sandisk, Intel sees SSDs as being useful in not only laptops, but desktops and servers too. The disk we saw has a S-ATA connector, but Intel wouldn't tell us whether it was S-ATA II or not. Our questions as to capacity and read/write speeds were also rebuffed, although Intel did let slip that we'll hear more about the SSD line-up in a few weeks.