Ｗａｙｎｅ：This is my life in technicolor！

Intel's "Nehalem" will contain a technology called "turbo mode" that will dynamically reroute power to improve performance, an Intel executive said Tuesday.

An improved version of the turbo mode will also appear in the first mobile version of Nehalem, the Calpella platform, next year, executives said.

Nehalem is the flagship product of this year's Intel Developer Forum and most likely – for Intel, at least – 2009 in general. The desktop version of Nehalem, now renamed the Core i7, is the product of Intel's "tick tock" strategy, where a new process technology is introduced first, and then a new microarchitecture. Intel shifted to 45-nm process technologies last year, and this year it's time for the new microarchitecture, Nehalem, to be introduced.

For Pat Gelsinger, who leads Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, Nehalem represents the most dynamically scalable architecture in the industry. That appears to mean that Intel will be able to easily scale up and down clocks and threads, and add capabilities like graphics and other accelerators to future cores.

"The only records left to beat are our own," Gelsinger said.

Many aspects of Nehalem have alredy been announced, among them features like two to eight cores, a 4-instruction-wide ISA, and two-way simultaneous multithreading. Other notable additions include the QuickPath interconnect, with up to 25 Gbytes/s per link, and an integrated memory controller, following AMD into the market. In addition, there will be a new 8-Mbyte shared level 3 cache.

Here's Intel's Nehalem roadmap, as officially released by Intel: Nehalem's first server processor (codenamed "Nehalem-EP") will be first to production. Intel is also planning to manufacture a second server derivative designed for the expandable sever market ("Nehalem-EX"), the company said, and desktop ("Havendale" and "Lynnfield") and mobile ("Auburndale" and "Clarksfield") versions in the second half of 2009. The Calpella mobile platform will connect to the Auburndale and Clarksfield processors.

The Core i7 will ship sometime during the fourth quarter, although Intel isn't saying exactly when. It will be a four-core chip, capable of eight threads. Its clock speed and performance have not been disclosed.

Power management has been a key design attribute for Intel and other hardware manufacturers for a number of years, and Nehalem is no exception. Unfortunately, Intel declined to disclose the thermal design power of the new chip.

Turbo mode, however, will be an innovative feature that will span the new family and will be used in future processors as well, according to Rajesh Kumar, an Intel fellow and architecture of the new turbo mode feature. "We wanted to develop an entirely new process technology for power," Kumar said.

Previous Intel power management has turned off portions of the chip that was not in use, including other cores. In a single-threaded application, this can leave several cores idle. Turbo mode turns those off. However, the power budget that normally would be applied to those cores can now be rerouted to the cores that are active, boosting their performance even more, without wasting power. The result is one, two, or three cores, either slightly to significantly overclocked. In his keynote, Gelsinger said that two out of the four cores were overclocked by "two bins," or two higher speed grades.

The new feature is a so-called "power gate" that was newly designed for the Nehalem architecture, that can block switching and leakage power loss. The gates were made possible by a several-millimeter-thick "slab" of copper on the top of the die, a package-like material that Intel refers to as "M9".

"In many senses, Nehalem on the desktop is just more of the same," Mike Feibus, principal analyst at TechKnowledge, said in an interview. "With the additional power management, you can do so much more. It turns the notebook into a pretty powerful device."

The new power management block itself contains a million transistors, more than the 386 processor Gelsinger originally designed. In a separate keynote, Dadi Perlmutter, executive vice president and general manager of Intel's Mobility Group, promised that that the mobile version of Nehalem, code named Calpella, "will use that revolutionary power management and even more," he said.

Gelsinger also talked about the alleged software support that "Larrabee," Intel's next-generation graphics architecture is winning, but did not show off silicon. He also reminded attendees that the Itanium processor is alive and well, and that the "Tukwila" version will ship in the first half of 2009. The six-core Xeon 7400 or Dunnington processor, a member of the older "Penryn" family, will ship next month.

Gelsinger also showed an in-car entertainment system from BMW, in conjunction with Wind River's embedded OS and the embedded Atom processor. The system played movies on seatback screens, and used a 3D navigation system that connected to the Encyclopedia Britannica that provided additional information as the car traversed a virtual environment.