Intel is repeating its Nehalem strategy to anyone who will listen in briefings that generally mimic one another. The company appeared in the past month at IDF, Siggraph, etc. Little new was discussed from one appearance to the next.

But something struck me in a discussion of Nehalem at the Hot Chips conference on Tuesday. In addition to creating a processor with more cores – a maximum of eight – Intel focused a great deal of energy on improving the performance of each core.

Sound reminiscent of the processor speed wars of earlier this decade, when staying in front of Advanced Micro Devices was the name of the game?

In a coherent talk at the technical conference held at Stanford University, Senior Principal Engineer Ronak Singhal spelled out the improvements to the core that should offer a boost in performance when a four-core version of the chip first shows up in the fourth quarter.

These improvements include trying to better predict the chip's expected workload; increasing parallelism, or the ability to jobs simultaneously; and enabling the processor to better handle new and legacy software.

They were a major piece of the "philosophy" driving development, Singhal said.

You can guess where it will go from here.

By Mark Boslet, Editor at Large.