Intel creates Dunnington and Nehalem processors

Intel Corp. takes further steps in the field of multiprocessing. The light is pointed at Dunnington processor.

Photo: Intel creates Dunnington and Nehalem processors

It was found out that Intel will create a 45 nm monolithic chip, consisting of a number of pairs of Core2 processors each sharing a 3M L2, and a 16M shared L3 cache; it will be pin-compatible with Tigerton. The briefing material is non-committal on the number of pairs of processors on the chip, though there has been one report that the number is three (so six cores in total).

Dunnington will appear just before Nehalem. Nehalem will be released in late 2008 for high-end chips and early 2009 for mainstream chips.

Nehalem has the most significant new architectural changes as of today since the Pentium Pro back in 1995. Nehalem is highly scalable with different components for different tasks. According to Intel it will have 1 through 8+ cores, integrated memory controllers for DDR3 SDRAM with 1 to 4 memory channels and be manufactured using the same 45 nm manufacturing process as its predecessor, Penryn. Intel announced at the Intel Developer Forum in September 2007 that some versions of Nehalem will also have an integrated graphics subsystem off-die, but in the same CPU package. Nehalem processors will also utilize the new point-to-point processor interconnect, the Intel QuickPath Interconnect, replacing the legacy front side bus.