We took a little while to visit the Intel booth in the central hall of the LVCC. Their display was massive, but we were happy to stumble upon Intel’s David Scheer to talk about the Core i7’s Turbo Boost technology.

He was eager to demonstrate the Core i7 965 XE’s ability to run up to 266MHz above its default clockspeed when the chip is loaded and maintains a safe TDP. In fact, they wrote a program just for the convention that shows the frequency of the chip in real time and has a meter that demonstrates the clockspeed boost derived directly from turbo-only multipliers. We asked if it was available in some way, and he mentioned that they’re cleaning it up for public consumption.

We got into a great discussion about Intel architecture and also learned that all future Intel architectures are progressing as planned. This means that the 32nm die shrink of the Nehalem, Westmere, is right on target for the end of the year or “early 2010.”

Regarding Nehalem, they’re working on developing models for both the SMP server space and the notebook space. It was implied that these divisions, which were once separate, are now working together to make a family of products baked from the same silicon.

Regarding the server space, Scheer mentioned that these chips are in the wings with “extra features,” but it wasn’t clear if he was referring to the typical SMP support or extra juju we’ve not yet seen. We also asked about octo-core chips — theoretically carrying the Beckton name from original roadmaps — and he explained that he wasn’t at liberty to speak on that topic.

We also asked about the rumor floating about that the Atom is actually a capable chip that only appears sluggish because of its poor chipset. We know it fails hard at decoding HD content, so it can’t be that powerful, but we were fishing to see if there was untapped potential. Unfortunately this was also outside his division, and we didn’t ask about Intel’s take on NVIDIA’s ION platform as a result.

Last but not least we mentioned that we had been tinkering with 4GHz on air, and all we received was an enigmatic little smile. It’s clear that Intel knows they have amazing silicon on hand with the Nehalem, and they’re proud of the fact that they’re producing chips that are going gangbusters on benchmarks. Mr. Scheer demonstrated an obvious passion for the product he helps to develop, and it was both refreshing and engaging to speak with him about Intel’s approach to CPUs. Yeah, we had a nerd connection going. It was swank.

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