Revision as of 13:42, 30 November 2017

Nehalem was the microarchitecture for Intel's 45 nm process for desktops and servers as a successor to Penryn. Nehalem is named after the Nehalem River. Nehalem was replaced by the Westmere microarchitecture in 2010.

Nehalem wafer

Process Technology

Penryn-based microprocessors were manufactured on a 45 nm process. Intel's 45 nm process is the is the first high-volume manufacturing process to introduce High-k + metal gate transistors.

Scaling:

	Core	Nehalem	Δ
	65 nm	45 nm
Metal Layers	8	9
Gate Pitch	220 nm	180 nm	0.82x
Interconnect Pitch	210 nm	160 nm	0.76x
SRAM bit cell​ (HD)	0.570 µm²	0.346 um²	0.61x
SRAM bit cell​ (LP)	0.680 µm²	0.382 um²	0.56x

Die Shot

Bloomfield

• 263 mm²
• 713,000,000 transistors
• 45 nm process
• 4 cores

Lynfield

• 296 mm²
• 774,000,000 transistors
• 45 nm process
• 4 cores

Nehalem-EX

• 648 mm²
• 2.300,000,000 transistors
• 45 nm process
• 8 cores