Intel Offers Users Absurd Variety of Paths to Nehalem, and 32nm Debuts at Low-End

AMD seems to have learned its lesson, and is building a lot of backwards compatibility into its AM3 CPUs. Intel, which has benefited immensely from the ubiquity of LGA 775, has decided that the best way to roll out Nehalem is across three different sockets, on the consumer desktop side alone.

We already have the Core i7 line, which uses an LGA 1336 socket. They are enthusiast products and run on the equally extreme X58 Tylersburg platform. Of interest, this is the same socket used by Nehalem server chips.

We knew the midrange chips, Lynnfield and Havendale, would use a different socket, presumably LGA 1156. Recently, Intel announced that they would be pouring $7 billion into facilities to build 32nm chips. What with the rough economy, this was taken with a lot of fanfare. The problem is, the upgrade path for users is less than clear.

Picking a socket is bad enough when you are trying to decide between a new, more expensive, but more upgradable platform; or an older and cheaper one. The move to Nehalem was difficult enough to plan before we discovered we would be choosing from two incompatible hardware platforms.

LGA 1336, as the enthusiast socket, is the obvious choice for the deep-pocketed user. The problem is, as a server product, your paying for things you will never need, like the ability to have a second Quick Path Interconnect that connects to a second CPU that isn’t there. Even with a big budget, that kind of thing is irksome.

Those with more modest budgets figured they could sit tight and wait for Nehalem at the mainstream level on the Ibex Peak platform. It would use a LGA 1156 socket, and you would never be able to upgrade to a Core i7 or get triple-channel memory benefits. But you wouldn’t have to pay for three sticks of memory, or worse yet, the hidden cost of the extra, useless, QPI in the socket. Even this was slightly simplistic, since the Tylersburg and Ibex Peak platforms differ in a lot more than socket and memory set up. We’ll discuss this in a coming article.

For now, we have a more blatant complication. Intel’s plan to stay on their famous tick-tock schedule (apparantly even if the products resulting from it aren't in demand), with at least a few 32nm parts out the door by year’s end, has resulted in changes to the mainstream Nehalem roll out, on desk and laptop.