Intel plans six-core chip, due late this year
The race to cram multiple cores into processor chips has stepped up a notch, with leaked plans from Intel showing the company intends to ship a hexa-core model, dubbed Dunnington, before the end of the year.
Chip giant Intel is working on a new version of its Xeon server processor that incorporates three dual-cores, giving the chip six individual processing engines.
Details of the chip have surfaced on a number of internet sites following what appears to be the inadvertent posting of an internal briefing presentation on a Sun Microsystems public web server.
According to the presentation, given by Intel to Sun last month, Dunnington is a 45nm-based chip and forms part of Intel's next-generation Penryn family.
Intel's Dunnington 6 core CPU: leaked by Sun Microsystems by mistake
The new chip will replace the older Tigerton processor, which was constructed by combining two Core 2 Duo processors on a single chip. Dunnington will use three dual cores in its design.
Intel is remaining tight lipped about the chip but details in the presentation are consistent with the company's previously stated product development roadmaps.
Slides from the presentation show that the new processors will be backwardly compatible with Tigerton, making upgrades to existing servers and workstations easy.
The presentation also shows each pair of processor cores on Dunnington chips will share 3 megabytes of Level 2 cache while each of the six cores will also be able to use 16 megabytes of Level 3 cache.
The decision by Intel to construct its new chips by essentially tying together three dual-cores will doubtless attract criticism from some design experts. The company was derided when it opted to create its quad-core models by stitching together two dual cores.
However the move allowed Intel to get its quad-core offerings to market well ahead of arch rival AMD which struggled with some of the finer challenges in getting its much anticipated Barcelona quad-core chips out the door.