David Flynn15 October 2009, 11:32 PM
The rumour mill is spinning up for Apple’s early 2010 releases, with suggestions that a new Mac Pro desktop will mark the debut of Intel’s six-core Xeon ‘Core i9’ superslab.
It’s impossible to underestimate just how much Intel loves being Apple’s chip of choice.
The walk-on spots at the MacWorld keynotes, the ability to showcase Apple’s undeniably cool kit at Intel’s own chipset events – it’s like the high school science geek dating the hot cheerleader.
Part of this relationship is that Apple often gets first shot at Intel’s latest wares. It happened with the original pint-sized Core 2 Duo processor, the ‘mini-Merom’ which Intel created for the MacBook Air and many months later released to the manufacturers of Windows notebooks.
And according to
HardMac.com it’s set to happen again.
The site reports that Apple is in the home stretch for its next generation of Mac Pro systems and is putting Intel’s unnannounced six-core Nehalem processor through its paces.
Codenamed ‘Gulftown’, the chip officially belongs to the same Xeon line of server-class chips which are inside the current Mac Pro towers. The Xeon was Intel’s first processor built on the 45nm Nehalem microarchitecture and has been through several iterations and price drops.
The scuttlebutt is that the 2010 superslab will feature a die-shrink to 32nm and be re-branded as the Core i9, sitting at the top of Intel’s ‘Core’ family which recently gained the mid-range
Core i5 processor. A lower-spec
Core i3 chip is due to slot into the entry-level position early next year.
HardMac claims the Core i9 will sport six hyperthreaded cores with 12MB of shared cache. The smaller 32nm lithography is said to result in a slightly lower power consumption for the six-core processor than today’s quad-core 45nm CPU.