Circuit and Process Innovations to Enable High-performance, and Power and Area Efficiency on the Nehalem and Westmere Family of Intel Processors

Achieving high performance, energy efficiency, and scalability across a large power envelope were the high-level goals of the designers of the Intel® microarchitecture code name Nehalem and Intel® microarchitecture code name Westmere processors. This article describes the key innovations in circuit technology that were implemented along with the co-optimization of process and circuits to achieve...