Chip junkies-silicon, not potato-have been hearing about Nehalem for two years. It's Intel's latest microarchitec-ture, and it's one of a number of developments causing servers to morph toward blades. The recurring themes in the pressure on server architectures are bandwidth and efficiency. These changes are sweeping enough that they should have you rethinking what you want out of servers and how you deploy applications going forward. Over the past two weeks, Cisco made waves with its unified computing announce- ments, which call for a single 10-Gb pipe into the server. This week it's Intel's turn. Intel has gotten into a rhythm of alternating the announcement of smaller transistor gates-some as small as 32 nanometers-and new architectures. Recent architectural announcements have been all about getting more than one processor core onto a chip, an important de- sign change by any measure. As Intel has been packing more cores onto the chip, it hasn't been changing other system features. Most notably, it has kept its "front side bus" architecture longer than it should have.
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