Intel revealed the architectural details Aug. 20 of its next-generation Intel “Nehalem,” now known as Intel Core i7, and with it some twists on the classic x86 architecture.
One of the key goals of Nehalem was to make the architecture scalable, in two very different ways. The pieces of Nehalem are broken into two main components, which the company is calling the core and the “uncore.” The core is what you’d expect, containing all the computational units, branch prediction and registers, plus the Level 1 and L2 caches.
Some of the other advances like an integrated memory controller and a shared L3 cache first appeared on the AMD Phenom.