Anandtech managed to get their hands on a Nehalem sample, the future evolution of Intel CPU to replace the current Penryn in couple of month. They run comparison test between a 4-core Nehalem clocked at 2.67GHz and a 4-core Penryn Core 2 at the same frequency. The Nehalem is respectively 28% and 44% faster for DivX and x264 encoding, and obtain a 24% higher score with Cinebench R10.
Such performance gain can be assigned to the new architecture but also to other improvement:
- For the first time in Intel CPU, the memory controller is integrated in the processor. As a consequence, the memory bandwidth is doubled when compared to the Core 2 Penryn, and the memory latency decreased by 40%
- The Nehalem support the Hyperthreading technology which allows creating 2 logic cores per physical core. One can then maximize the CPU load on each core.
- The Nehalem features a large L3 cache, wh
