Looks like Intel isn't playing around. Six core before the end of the year.
" In a conference call from intel yesterday details where revealed on Intels up-coimg Dunnington, the company's upcoming six-core server part; Nehalem, the next-generation architecture that will supplant Core 2 processors later this year; and Larrabee, Intel's forthcoming discrete graphics processor.
Dunnington feature six cores, 16MB of L3 cache, and a staggering 1.9 billion transistors. Dunnington's six cores will all be Core 2-based, and the processor will slip into the same Caneland platform as today's Socket 604, Xeon 7300-series CPUs. Dunnington appears to be a single-die product, unlike Intel's four-core offerings that are just two dual-core dies tacked together on the same package. Shipments are due some time in the second half of the year.
Then Intel chatted about Nehalem which boasts the Core microarchitecture that's at the heart of most Intel CPUs today, and we've known for a while that it will bring several major enhancements, like the addition of an integrated memory controller and the QuickPath point-to-point interconnect (the answer to AMD's HyperTransport). it'll feature a three-channel DDR3 memory controller with support for DDR3 speeds as high as 1333MHz. The triple-channel controller will appear on both desktop and server/workstation offerings, and it will support three memory modules per channel. Using current 2GB DDR3-1333 modules, that means you'd be able to cram 18GB of RAM into a single desktop PC and yield a theoretical maximum of 31.99GB/s of bandwidthimpressive, to say the least. Interestingly, Nehalem chips will only feature 256KB of L2 cache per core and 8MB of L3 cache per chip. That's a little on the light side compared to Intel's existing 45nm quad-core parts, which have 12MB of L2 cache (one shared 6MB L2 cache per die). AMD's upcoming 45nm quad-core offerings, for reference, will have 512KB of L2 cache per core and 6MB of L3 cache per chip. Intel expects Nehalem to hit production in the fourth quarter of this year
Then the focus was Intel's graphics solution in development under codename Larrabee. Larrabee will combine a large array of Intel Architecture (i.e. x86) cores with a brand-new cache architecture, a new vector instruction set, and a new vector processing unit. Gelsinger specified that Larrabee's programmable architecture will allow it to accelerate anything from high-definition video and audio processing to physics, artificial intelligence, and global illumination. it's confirmed that Larrabee will be compatible with DirectX and OpenGL application programming interfaces, so Larrabee should be able to run existing games. Intel plans to show its first demos of Larrabee in action later this year, with a product launch to follow in either 2009 or 2010. " From guru3d.
