On Tueday, Intel representatives stated that the company's next-generation platform for notebooks will provide more visually stunning graphics as well as better power management features.

According to Macworld UK, company officials laid out details regarding a project code-named "Calpella", Intel's next mobile platform, at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. The platform, which will succeed the current Centrino 2 mobile platform, is slated for release in 2009 and will include chips based on Intel's upcoming Nehalem microarchitecture.

Nehalem, which is expected to reach consumers in the second half of 2009, will offer two to four cores on a chip (up from the current Core 2 chips) and cut bottlenecks from the Core microarchitecture to help deliver better speeds and performance-per-watt.

The new architecture will integrate the memory controller and graphics core into the CPU for Nehalem-based laptops, thereby boosting system and graphics performance, according to the company. This should also reduce the need of integrated graphics capabilities, though gamers may need a discrete graphics card for high-end graphics performance.

The first Nehalem chips will reach high-end desktops, said Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president at Intel, during a speech at the forum. Intel's first Nehalem chip has been branded "Core i7" and will ship in the fourth quarter this year. The Nehalem-based server products, code-named Nehalem-EP, will go into production later this year, and will be followed up by another version, code-named Nehalem-EX, which will go into production in 2009.

The Nehalem chips themselves will feature between two and eight cores with speeds enhanced by Intel's QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) technology, which integrates a memory controller and provides a faster communications pipe between chips and system components. The Nehalem architecture will support DDR3 memory and include a shared eight megabytes of L3 cache for local core to better execute threads. Each core will be able to execute two software threads simultaneously, so a server with eight processor cores could potentially run 16 threads simultaneously.

The new chips will also feature Turbo Mode technology, which improves power efficiency of the chips by disabling inactive cores to prevent power leakage.

"The key idea in power management is quite simple - to shut things off when not in use," said Rajesh Kumar, an Intel fellow during a presentation at the forum.

Stay tuned for more details as they become available and let us know what you think over in the comments or forums.