Intel and Advanced Micro Devices have been known to be working on six-core central processing units for quite some time, with recent leaks and rumors even hinting at the possible product specifications of the processors. Intel's Core i5/i7 roadmap has already supposedly
been exposed and AMD's plans were also reportedly
unveiled not so long ago. More recently, Intel has even
confirmed plans for launching the six core during the first half of the ongoing year and has even revealed that it plans to also release a 45nm-based,
eight-core chip.
Naturally, Intel once again refrained from handing out any type of clear information on the products, or their full product specifications. The 32nm Gulftown six-core CPU is still set to become Intel's high-end offering. The processor will be based on the Westmere architecture and will have 12MB of L3 cache.
According to Intel Senior Principle Engineer Nasser Kurd, Intel plans to launch not only the Gulftown (which is aimed at desktops), but also a six-core chip meant for servers. Both processors would boast a better performance than the 45nm quad-core version, while using no additional power. The CPUs will even support a dynamic power reduction for DDR memory and Quick Patch Interconnect at up to 6.4GB per second.
Among the chip's supported features are the turbo boost, hyper-threading, AES encryption and three channels of DDR3 or low-voltage DDR3 memory. The latter type of DDR is expected to reduce the CPU DDR power consumption by 20 percent. Other product specs that were revealed are a die size of about 240mm2 and 1.17 billion transistors.
The eight-core processor that the Santa Clara-based company was said to have disclosed was the Nehalem EX. This chip will supposedly be based on the 45nm manufacturing process and will also launch in the first half of the year. Unfortunately, the company did not give out any other details, such as the clock speeds.
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