Before we dive deep into Westmere, let's take a moment to clear up all of the codenames that are floating around. Westmere, first and foremost, is the latest microarchitecture out of Intel, and is not the name of the processors which use it. Rather, those names are Clarkdale (Desktop) and Arrandale (Mobile). The former isn't to be confused with Clarksfield, which is Intel's mobile Nehalem (45nm). On the chipset side, all LGA1156 models thus far (P55, H55, et cetera) are classified as Ibex Peak. Future six-core Westmere's (which will not include an IGP) use the Gulftown codename. Finally, Westmere's IGP is codenamed Ironlake.
To help confuse things further, Westmere is ultimately based on Lynnfield, which was derived from Nehalem. That means that the same Nehalem features that were shaved off for Lynnfield are also gone from Westmere. This is putting it all simply, however, as Westmere features a few things Lynnfield processors do not, such as the AES-NI instruction set. We'll tackle this and more throughout the article.
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