Intel announced yesterday that its upcoming chip micro-architecture, called Nehalem, would also be scaled down for laptops. However, the brand new high tech chips would come first for servers and high-end desktop computers.

According to Pat Gelsinger, Intel’s senior vice president and general manager of the digital enterprise group, Nehalem will bring together between two and eight cores on one chip. The Nehalem architecture represents a really significant upgrade to the popular chip maker’s current Core 2 micro-architecture. However, during the press briefing held by Pat Gelsinger on Monday, he did not reveal any details related to Intel’s plans for Nehalem laptops. According to a spokesman, the company is going to touch on this subject at the Intel Developer Forum in Shanghai in April.

But, according to what is known so far, it seems that each core in the already popular Nehalem chips will be able to execute two distinct software threads simultaneously. This means that a server’s eight-core chip could potentially run 16 threads at the same time and this is quite amazing! Each core will have 256 KB of L2 cache, as well as a shared 8 MB L3 cache, which means that local cores can execute threads better, according to Pat Gelsinger.

The Nehalem architecture will be quite different and powerful compared to all the others architectures created by Intel or its rivals. These chips were designed to deliver improved system performance and better performance-per-watt.

The Nehalem chips are set to launch in late 2008.