Intel Nehalem Overview

That’s right – Intel continues to break barriers down with new processor technology every day, although the only software company able to take advantage of the new design currently is IBM. The new “Nehalem-EX” CPU microarchitecture is a pioneer in hyperthreading and multicore technology, and is currently unmatched by any other architecture at the moment (but these things always change, of course).

Octacore, 24MB Cache, 16 Threads all into one chip. While clock speed is still up in the air as this is more of an architectural advancement than a speed improvement, the design is sure to draw the attention of HPC coordinators and backend datacenter architects everywhere, except for one thing:

Software isn’t ready for it.

Intel is once again taking more of leap than we can handle, as Anthony pointed out in the post “The Sad State of Modern Computing“. Without operating systems capable of taking advantage of this new hardware Intel and other chip leaders are churning out, they are as good as doorstops.

The CPU still has advantages we can currently utilize without a breakthrough in kernel scheduling, however: the cores can still to an extent be utilized by the SMP mechanism of current operating systems, and the whopping 24MB cache can be used to temporarily store instructions and other high-demand memory pointers for intense database operations and other high-performance needs.

The chip is certainly a breakthrough in CPU architecture, and IBM seems to be the first to realize this and get onboard. This YouTube video features an IBM (Series z?) mainframe taking adequate advantage of the new CPU at concurrent processing of 128 threads: