On the Nehalem front, the details were little short of a revelation. As well as a totally new CPU microarchitecture, Intel will be abandoning the traditional FSB (front side bus) in favour of a completely new platform approach. A serial point-to-point link will replace the FSB, and the system's memory controller will be integrated into the CPU.
This effectively means Intel is adopting the basic platform architecture AMD has been using in its Athlon 64 and Opteron processors for years, despite Intel's protestations that the front side bus architecture was fit and well.
A further surprise came with the announcement that it will produce a variant with graphics processing integrated into the CPU, eliminating the need for a separate graphics card.
Stephen Smith, vice
Think I'll stick with what I have for a couple years.
