Sure, some companies are just now getting on that quad-core, 45nm bandwagon, but that isn't stopping Intel from moving to 6-cores on a single CPU. "Dunnington," as it's currently being called, will be the world's first 6-core chip, will sport 16MB of L3 cache and will be manufactured using Intel's 45nm process. More exciting, however, is Nehalem, which we've been hearing about for some time now. While Dunnington is based on current Intel CPU architecture, Nehalem is set to represent a huge step forward, toward a totally scalable, 45nm architecture. The idea is that the core Nehalem chip (pardon my pun) will be a quad-core part that can be used to create CPUs that will scale from two cores all the way up to eight cores. Thus, Intel will be able to launch server, desktop and laptop chips based on Nehalem, which should lead to more new chips, more often. What's more, Nehalem supports Simultaneous Multi-Threading (each core can run two threads simultaneously) and up to DDR3-1333 RAM, has 8MB of L3 cache and Quickpath interconnects and boasts four times the memory bandwidth of the current top-of-the-line Xeons. When can we expect it? Both Dunnington and Nehalem are scheduled to arrive during 2008.
For more on Intel's 2008 roadmap:
- see this Ars Technica article
