Staring into its crystal ball of processor architecture, Intel offered a glimpse of its forthcoming Nehalem platform at a press meeting yesterday. Unlike the Core 2 Duo-derived, 45nm Penryn chips (scheduled to ship later this year), Nehalem represents a major departure from Intel chips currently on the market. Nehalem has been engineered from the ground-up to take advantage of the 45nm manufacturing process and represents a completely new approach for tailoring different chip designs for different markets. “Nehalem is not only designed to take Intel up to eight cores on a single die, but those cores are meant to be mixed and matched with varied amounts of cache and different features in order to produce processors that are tailored to specific market segments,” Ars writes. Some Nehalem chips will also sport an on-die memory controller (a first for Intel) and integrated graphics. While a die-level integrated GPU (like that in AMD’s Fusion project) would be good for power-consumption and mobile devices, let’s hope that it doesn’t lead to more laptops with integrated graphics. According to current roadmaps, Nehalem will go into production in 2008.

For more on Nehalem:
– see this Ars Technica article