Intels next chips?

[jusomdude]

I know AMD's next chips are the Phenom and Barcelona but what does Intel have on the horizon?

 

[jusomdude]

NM, think I found 'em... Penryn and Nehalem

 

[dragonsprayer]

dude intels next chip is here now

core 2 was july 06 and amd still sells the same stuff
kentfield was nov of 07

the 1333 fsb is new! where u been?

amd just rereleases the same junk over and over while they try figure why it did not work - amd tried to make too big of jump

 

[Wisecracker]

tick . . . . tock

Anand AMD Roadmap - 07-26-07
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3050

Anand on Penryn - April, 2007
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=2972

 

[wolverinero79]

Regardless of the names (most are probably not known), Intel's new thing is to work on a tick tock methodology. Each year is a tick or a tock.

I'm not sure which is which, but essentially imagine a tick being a new CPU microarchitecture and a tock being a process shrink (like from 65nm to 45nm).

So say Core 2 is a tick (2006) - new arch at 65nm
Penryn is a tock (2007) - 45nm shrink of Core 2 + goodies like High K metal gate
Nehalam is a tick (2008) - new arch at 45nm
Westmere is a tock (2009) - shrink of Nehalam at 32nm
Gesher (now called Sandy Bridge according to Wikipedia due to political issues) is a tick (2010) - new arch at 32nm

Intel's been quiet about 2009+, but there have been many rumors. My favorite has been integrating a graphics chip onto a CPU. Most likely it will be in a new arch, so the next one after Nehalam (since I doubt it will be in Nehalam) is 2010. However, Penryn is supposed to be pretty amazing - high k is basically a complete shift for Intel in transistor design - people don't realize Intel's basically radically changing the very base part of a chip. And Penryn really was only "supposed to be" a shrink of Core 2. Obviously, that's not the case, so maybe the "shrink" of Nehalam will be pretty awesome and include the graphics part as well.

What I expect is for Barcelona to be released as a paper launch and to post 10-20% higher than Core 2 in some benchmarks (not all). Then, Penryn will be released very soon after as well as Tigerton (Core 2 MP - a direct threat to Barcy Server product). Since Intel usually launches with product, we may see actual product from both companies hit shelves at the same time. I would expect Penryn to at least make things even across the board and excel at some benchmarks. We really have no idea though, since AMD has had no independent benchmarks yet (completely uncharacteristic for the company).

What we have yet to seen is also an 8 core CPU. I don't know if the market and software exist for that yet, but there have been rumors that at least one of the companies is working on this.