Companies typically keep a fairly tight lid on their roadmaps; updates tend to either be carefully controled or "accidentally" leaked. Leaked roadmaps, official or not, always run the risk of being wrong, but there's a new series of Intel updates making the rounds that certainly could be right, based on what we know about the CPU manufacturer's plans. Keep in mind, however, that all roadmaps are subject to legitimate change. The roadmaps below might be perfectly accurate for what Intel currently plans to do within the 2008-2010 time frame, but the company always has the right to change its mind.

PCWatch published a set of diagrams, including multiple Nehalem breakdowns if you want to see how the Lynnfield, Havendale, Westmere, and Bloomfield cores compare to each other. In this article, we'll focus on Intel's overall roadmap through 2010, as well as recap some information on Atom you may have missed the first time around. Remember, however, nothing here is official until Intel says it's official.

(Click on the graph for a full version).

All of the current projections are accurate, and they show how well Intel has currently seeded the market with strong value parts—Intel's E7300 (2.6GHz Wolfdale, 3MB L2) is significantly faster than its ranking in "Essential" would indicate, for example. Moving into Q4, we see Nehalem's launch (Bloomfield-only, and only down as far as "Mainstream 3." Save for the new Core i7 introduction, that's pretty much it for Intel until the end of Q2/early Q3. At that time, Intel launches a full Nehalem-flavored lineup, and pushes Core 2 all the way to the "Value 2" segment. At this point, it appears that Intel will push current Core 2 Duo technology into the Celeron line, and stretch Nehalem-class products into all other segments. Below that point, we see the upcoming Atom processors, as discussed above.

Looking ahead to 2010, we have six-core Westmere (currently set for the first half of the year) at the high-end of the

market. Intel, it seems, is bound and determined to push quad-core and hexa-core processors into the mass market, despite a

dearth of applications that support that many processors. This isn't exactly a new problem, and it's by no means a foregone

conclusion that we'll make any great leaps in performance scaling between now and then.

Atom in 2009

There aren't any dates on this section of the roadmap, but it's not hard to predict some given that the Atom 230 is already on the market with the 330 launching in a matter of weeks. These new chips should drop in 2009, though it's not clear if Intel will launch the single-core flavor before the dual-core, as it did this year. The two big changes, according to this roadmap, are the processor's new platform and an integrated GPU core. The GPU core may or may not be directly integrated into Atom; Intel could also opt to use a multi-die package.

The fact that these new boards use DMI instead of a standard FSB indicates the presence of an integrated memory controller, even if it isn't expressly mentioned on the diagram.This is further reason to suspect that Intel will use an MCM package for Pinefield, with the CPU+IMC on one die, and the GPU core on the other. The DMI link is what connects the MCH to the ICH, and the term FSB is no longer applicable.

This is hopefully evidence that Atom will finally have access to a desktop chipset more friendly to its power consumption. Both the Atom 230 and the upcoming Atom 330 are built on the decidedly rusty 945GC platform, and it shows—the 945GC chipset consumes several times more power than the Atom 230 itself. These new chips should also be clocked higher than the current 1.6GHz offerings; 1.8GHz is a safe bet, and 2GHz certainly isn't out of the question. I wasn't hugely impressed with the current-generation Atom 230 platform when I compared it to VIA's Nano, but a dual-core 2GHz Atom on an appropriate platform could be a different story.