Intel ships samples of Westmere PC chips

From InfoWorld: Intel's new Westmere microprocessors are being sampled by PC makers and will ship in volume later this year, the company's CEO said Tuesday.

The chips have shipped to about 30 laptop and desktop PC makers for testing, said Paul Otellini, Intel's CEO, during an earnings conference call. The chips could be on sale in PCs by early next year, he said.

Westmere is a shrink of Intel’s Nehalem microarchitecture, which is used in the Core i7 desktop and Xeon 5500 server chips. Nehalem integrates a memory controller with the CPU and provides a faster pipeline for communication with other system components. The laptop version of Westmere is code-named Arrandale, while the desktop chips are code-named Clarkdale.

Intel revamped its chip road map in February, saying it would move to a 32-nanometer process more quickly than it had originally planned. The new chips will be built with that process.

Arrandale is expected to improve graphics performance while drawing less power than existing Core 2 processors. The chips will integrate the graphics processor and CPU on a single chip. Clock speeds could be similar to chips used in existing laptops, but are expected to offer better performance by running more threads on each core.

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