Digital Home Thoughts: Intel Reveals Nehalem Processors

"The impending launch of Intel's Nehalem processor in Q4 2008 already has the hardware community buzzing. Nehalem has already shaped up to appear quite the performance beast. With the power of eight logical cores (four physical, doubled by hyper-threading) built on a 45 nm process to leverage, it's shaping up to be a strong offering. The new processor will feature QuickPath, Intel's answer to AMD's HyperTransport, an on-chip memory controller, SSE4 instruction support, and an 8 MB cache pool. Chips have already been demoed running at 3.2 GHz, so early indications are that Intel has had relatively little process problems."

These new processors look great, but the hard truth is that even with four hyper-threaded cores rocking eight threads, unless software breaks through the current barrier of being coded for a single core (or maybe two if you're lucky), performance isn't going to go up by very much. Leveraging multiples cores matters the most when it comes to media encoding, and the problem is that most developers don't seem to be able to code their applications to take advantage of multiple cores. I've read that it's difficult to code applications to encode in parallel, but software developers have had a few years to figure this out - and I'm consistently disappointed with almost every piece of software I try. If Intel wants people be excited about their muti-core CPUs, they might need to take a few million dollars and develop a truly kick-ass multi-threaded encoder - then give it away for free so it can be adopted by all of the companies who make video editing software.