6-core Intel ‘Dunnington’ could be released next week

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.