We will tell you a bit more about Nehalem as Intel has confirmed that Nehalem can come as 2 to 8-core designs, and that each core supports multi-threading, which can cope with two software threads simultaneously.

It is the most scalable and dynamic design made by Intel and you can make a variety of products based on it, so you can expect dual-core, quad-core and eventually eight-core, but you shouldn’t exclude the six-core version, either.    

The first Nehalem to launch in Q4 2008 has four cores with eight threads and Intel said that the cores inside are derived from an advanced version of the Core 2 Penryn 45nm generation.

Therefore, Nehalem is derived from the Core 2 marchitecture, but the new Nehelam core has 128 instructions, compared to 96 instructions for the original Core 2 Duo.

Intel has increased the parallelism by some 33 percent, enhanced the algorithms that will enable faster access to cache and has implemented some branch prediction enhancements.  

When you take all this into account, the Nehalem should end up significantly faster by some 20 to 30 percent compared to a Core 2-based 45nm processor at the same clock.