Intel Nehalem Microarchitecture

Intel has said tha

t that Nehalem represents 

the biggest platform architecture change in the 

company's history to date. While there are some 

big changes ushered in by this new platform, the 

Core i7 processors are not entirely new and 

do borrow heavily from Penryn.

Monolithic Quad-Core:
The Core i7 does differ from its predecessors in a number 

of ways, however. For one, Core i7 processors feature a

monolithic die that house all four execution cores. If you 

remember, all of Intel's previous quad-core offerings were

built by linking two dual-core dies on a single package.

Intel's 45nm high-k metal gate manufacturing process 

will be use to produce all initial Core i7 processors.