Santa Clara (CA) – Intel’s six-core ‘Dunnington’ processor could be released next week’s at the VMWorld conference in Las Vegas.  The chip, officially known as the Xeon 7400, is manufactured on the 45 nm process and will be the last chip in the Penryn line.  The six cores share 16 MB of L3 cache and each pair of cores will share 3 MB of L2 cache (9 MB total).  Intel promises that chip will have a TDP rating of approximately 130 watts.

Like current generation Intel processors, the Dunnington will still require an external memory controller, but Intel hopes the large cache sizes in Dunnington will more than make up for any memory bottlenecks.  The upcoming Nehalem processors, which should be available in the fourth quarter, will solve this problem with an integrated memory controller.

The Dunnington, like other future Intel processors, will have all the cores in a single piece of silicon.  This is in contrast to the current generation of processors which are multiple cores fashioned into one package.  While some detractors say this technology is less elegant than AMD’s monolithic processors, it has allowed Intel to get to market faster.  In the end most consumers probably don’t care how the chip is made; they just want something that works.

It makes sense that Intel would release Dunnington at VMWare’s VMWorld conference as the chip is aimed at the blade/server market.  Virtualization of operating systems, the running of an OS inside of another OS, is a big thing these days and the system admins attending the show would most likely wet themselves over this new processor.

I'm afraid

Sep 11, 2008 16:26     

I'm afraid Nahalem is going to be the nail that drives the victory home for Intel in the processor market. The only time I ever recommend AMD to anyone these days is when they need the memory to work faster (Compiling, rendering... very memory intensive tasks). But with intel making their memory controller actually into their CPU that cuts yet another thing that AMD is better at out of the picture. I've always been an intel fanboy, but I'm not going to deny the quality AMD has. If AMD dies, we all lose due to intel controlling the vast majority of the CPU market.

JackCrackerMan report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +16

AMD might pick-up an unexpected crowd

Sep 11, 2008 19:55     

As most of us now know, Nehalem won't be much better for gaming than Peryn. So if AMD comes out wit ha processor that overclocks well and has plenty of cache...they might be able to keep limping on.
BDF report abuse vote down vote up Votes: -7

AMD needs to.....

Sep 11, 2008 21:46     

Instead of following Intel and make a 6 core leap over Intel and make a 8 core or more processor. I don't think that AMD's integrated CPU/GPU will pull it a head of Intel. If AMD does not wake up and do something dramatic Intel might be once again the only x86 maker. Competition is always good and benefits the consumer.
ThomFrost report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +5

@ BDF

Sep 12, 2008 01:50     

what are you talking about you clown you. who cares about the gaming crowd, look this is big man talk no kids allowed am afraid, this is the servers were talking about not desktop duh, even desktop don't matter as much as you would like to think, because its a very small market who do a bit of advertising for the company they like, that's all honest. gamers are trouble more than anything else.
x1reme report abuse vote down vote up Votes: -6

Wait for the Dunnington..

Sep 12, 2008 11:28     

I believe it is better to wait for the Dunnington with integrated memory controller. Integrated Memory controller gave AMD faster performance for long time over Intel. Once they put the memory controller inside the chip, they will unlock the full power of the Core 2 technology.
viktor report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

Jumpin Jack

Sep 12, 2008 11:36     

AMD haven't been sitting on their hands since getting their @ss handed to them with c2d. All Nehalem does for Intel is finally bring them up to speed in the Server market. When AMD releases their next refresh of Server products the field will be more even than Intel might like.
brit report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +1