Intel’s 6-core Dunnington enterprise processor to pave the way for Nehalem, coming 2H’08

Apparently Intel gave a presentation to Sun Microsystems last month in Austria about their upcoming products, including the previously elusive Dunnington architecture and the much-hyped Nehalem family. We have reported on Nehalem in the past and Dunnington is probably strictly a server chip, so what makes this story so special? Well, it seems someone at Sun slipped up and the slides from the presentation found their way to the company’s public web server. Of course, all it took was one tenacious reporter to grab the files and the secret was out.

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Sparing you the details of Nehalem, which we wrote about in pretty good detail already, the slides outline the architecture of a relatively unheard-of processor architecture called Dunnington. Whereas current quad-core Intel CPUs are basically two Core 2 Duo’s put together on the same package, Dunnington will be three Core 2 Duo’s put together on the same package. The architecture will incorporate a large, totally shared L3 cache bank in addition to the L2 cahce banks shared by each pair of cores. This is similar to AMD’s Phenom (Barcelona) processors, though each individual core in AMD’s model has its own bank of L2 cache. Dunnington will also be pin-compatible with current Tigerton Xeon processors from Intel, which means the new processor will work in existing Xeon platforms as a simple drop-in upgrade.

The slides also presented some performance data for Nehalem, which in turn was extrapolated by ZDNet blogger George Ou, who went so far as to make a pretty graph about it. Since the data presented in the graphs is not directly provided in the original slides, the numbers are entirely synthetic. We have seen these types of ‘benchmarks’ in the past, as performance of AMD’s Phenom desktop processors was extrapolated from existing data of slower, server-class Barcelona-based Opteron processors.

We’re not going to go in to the data presented in the graphs because, quite frankly, we have no idea what they mean and seriously doubt that we could care less about them, but you can check all of that out by following the links below.

Source: DailyTech, ZDNet

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