What is "nehalem"

Nehalem may refer to:

• Nehalem (people), or Tillamook, a Native American tribe
• Nehalem language, or Tillamook language, the language spoken by the Nehalem (Tillamook) tribe

Nehalem is the codename for an Intel processor microarchitecture, which is the successor to the older Core microarchitecture. A preview system with two Nehalem processors was shown at Intel Developer Forum in 2007, and the first processor released with the Nehalem architecture was the desktop Core i7, which was released in November 2008. The first generation of the Intel Core series of processors, Nehalem designs led to the introduction of Core i7 and i5 models (no Core i3 is based on Nehalem). The subsequent Westmere and Sandy Bridge designs would include Core i3 processors.

"Nehalem" is a recycled Intel codename and namesake of the Nehalem River. It is an architecture that differs radically from Netburst, while retaining some of the latter's minor features. Nehalem-based microprocessors use the 45 nm process, run at higher clock speeds, and are more energy-efficient than Penryn microprocessors. Hyper-threading is reintroduced, along with a reduction in L2 cache size, as well as an enlarged L3 cache that is shared among all cores.

Nehalem was replaced with the Sandy Bridge microarchitecture, released in January 2011.