Intel Next-Gen CPU Has Memory Controller and GPU
 

...Intel's Pat Gelsinger also made a number of high-level disclosures about the successor to Penryn, the 45nm Nehalem core. Unlike Penryn, which is a shrink/derivative of Core 2 Duo (Merom), Nehalem is architected from the ground up for 45nm. This is a major new design, and Gelsinger revealed some truly tantalizing details about it. Nehalem has its roots in the four-issue Core 2 Duo architecture, but the direction that it will take Intel is apparent in Gelsinger's insistence that, 'we view Nehalem as the first true dynamically scalable microarchitecture.' What Gelsinger means by this is that Nehalem is not only designed to take Intel up to eight cores on a single die, but those cores are meant to be mixed and matched with varied amounts of cache and different features in order to produce processors that are tailored to specific market segments.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...oller-smt.html

Ah nice, hadn't seen ArsTechnica's piece yet. Read Anandtech's overview yesterday, there's so much earth shattering info it's plain crazy to read.

This also explains why Intel would not confirm that Penryn was drop in compatible, since it comes with a 1,600FSB. Even for boards that OC that high, I would think a new BIOS might be needed for some of them, and not all manufacturers will issue a new BIOS for a technically unsupported CPU on the older boards.

So even if a user gets a new board for Penryn, they'll need a new one again for Nehalem, and almost certainly DDR3 to go with that unless Intel aims for a dual DDR2/DDR3 capable IMC.

MSI will provide BIOS for 1333FSB support on their older boards (that's what I picked up at Cebit) but no word on Penryn there yet.

poor AMD