Circuit and Process Innovations to Enable High-Performance, Power and Area Efficiency for 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 paper describes the key innovations in circuit technology that were implemented along with the co-optimization of process and circuits to achieve our goals.