As the release date nears (”later in November”), more reviews of Intel’s Nehalem are coming out. Here is AnandTech’s review. A bunch of links to other reviews is in Related Links section.

“Nehalem is a “tock” processor in Intel’s tick-tock cadence. That means it’s a new microarchitecture but based on an existing manufacturing process, in this case 45nm.

A quad-core Nehalem is made up of 731M transistors, down from 820M in Yorkfield, the current quad-core Core 2s based on the Penryn microarchitecture. The die size has gone up however, from 214 mm^2 to 263 mm^2. That’s fewer transistors but less densely packed ones, part of this is due to a reduction in cache size and part of it is due to a fundamental rearchitecting of the microprocessor.

Nehalem is Intel’s first “native” quad-core design, meaning that all four cores are a part of one large, monolithic die. Each core has its own L1 and L2 caches, and all four sit behind a large 8MB L3 cache. The L1 cache remains unchanged from Penryn (the current 45nm Core 2 architecture), although it is slower at 4 cycles vs. 3. The L2 cache gets a little faster but also gets a lot smaller at 256KB per core, whereas the lowest end Penryns split 3MB of L2 among two cores. The L3 cache is a new addition and serves as a common pool that all four cores can access, which will really help in cache intensive multithreaded applications (such as those you’d encounter in a server). Nehalem also gets a three-channel, on-die DDR3 memory controller, if you haven’t heard by now.”

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Related Links
A closer look at Nehalem Microarchitecture
Bad news for Core i7 with performance DDR3 memory
Introduction to the Nehalem Architecture (PCPerspective)
Intel Core i7 920, 940 and 965 Extreme Edition review (TechSpot)
Intel Core i7 920 and 965 review (Guru3D)
Intel Core i7 Performance Preview (Techgage)
Intel Core i7 920, 940 and 965 Extreme Edition (Legion Hardware)
Intel Core i7 – Nehalem Arrives and FSB Departs (TweakTown)
Intel Core i7 (Nehalem) Architecture Overview (Trusted Reviews)
The ultimate guide to Intel’s Core i7 (TechRadar)
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