TipAdept Dot Com

Intel revealed more details Monday about its plans for upcoming microprocessors, including the Dunnington server chip and the much-touted, next-generation Nehalem processor family. The products build on the company's 45nm high-k metal gate manufacturing technology, featuring new chips with four, six, eight or more computing cores.

Dunnington, Tukwila, Nehalem

Intel Senior Vice President Pat Gelsinger described the Dunnington six-core processor for expandable, or multiprocessor, servers. He said Dunnington, available in the second half of this year, will be the first Intel processor with six cores.

Featuring large share caches, Dunnington also offers FlexMigration, which enables a single virtualization pool to support both 65nm and 45nm-based servers. Gelsinger described FlexMigration as "investment protection" for evolving data centers.

He also discussed Tukwila, the code name for the company's new Itanium processor. As the world's first two billion-transistor microprocessor, Gelsinger said it will deliver more than twice the performance of the current Itanium processor. It will have four cores, 30MB total cache, QuickPath Interconnect, dual integrated memory controllers and mainframe-class RAS features.

Nehalem, a scalable microarchitecture for a family of processors, will have anywhere from two to eight cores, and its simultaneous multithreading will enable four- to 16-thread capability. Compared to current-generation Xeon-based systems, Nehalem quadruples the memory bandwidth and it can be utilized on a variety of devices, from notebooks to high-performance servers.

'Visual Computing' Platform

For demanding consumers and visualization professionals, Intel is also promoting what it called "next-generation techniques" for visual computing. The company said its new technologies will enable new levels of performance for such processing-intensive visual tasks as ray tracing for accurate shadow and lighting effects, game-based physics, or human motion in medical imaging. It will also support new levels of interactivity, such as game controllers that can "understand human motion" and that enable users to "become characters in their favorite games."

Intel...