The latest news on Intel unveiled the fact that the company plans to release its six-core ‘Dunnington’ processor at the VMWorld conference in Las Vegas, next week. The new chip is said to be the last one on the Penryn line; it will be manufactured on the 45nm fabrication process and will be officially known as Xeon 7400. This new CPU will come with 16 MB of L3 cache and will also feature 3 MB of L2 cache for each pair of cores (9MB in total). The TDP rating of the Xeon 7400 chip will be 130W, according to Intel.

The new Dunnington will need an external memory controller, the same as Intel's current line of processors, yet the company is confident that the large cache size the CPU features will help it get over any memory limitation. The giant chip manufacturer will release its first models of the next-generation Nehalem processors in the fourth quarter, which will feature an integrated memory controller supposed to solve memory bottlenecks.

The Xeon 7400, as well as other upcoming Intel chips, will feature all cores on a single piece of silicon. The current family of processors feature multiple cores shaped into one package. This differs from AMD's approach, which has monolithic processors, yet Intel got to the market faster this way. Although there are voices that shout against Intel's technology, there are few users that really care how the CPU is made as long as it works just fine.

The Dunnington chip is designed for the blade/server market, and this explains why Intel would have it released at VMWare’s VMWorld conference. As the virtualization of operating systems catches more and more ground these days, with one OS running inside another OS, the new processor will most likely attract many of the system administrators attending the show.