[ABA]UNDIES British Army Team
Posts : 582 Join date : 2007-12-17 Age : 50 Location : England's green and pleasant lands
| Subject: 8 Core CPU Next Month Sun 01 Feb 2009, 19:26 | |
| Yes, things are getting really silly now..... - Quote :
- Intel’s Xeons have always been given the Formula 1 treatment when it comes to trying out new technologies. The server and workstation series of CPUs brought us Hyper-Threading and even Nvidia’s SLI technology before they hit the desktop, and now Intel is set to unveil its first eight-core Xeon CPU at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) on 9 February.
The session is listed in the event’s online programme, and the summary describes a new ‘8-core 16-thread enterprise Xeon processor,’ which will feature a whopping 2.3 billion 45nm transistors. The following session will also continue to discuss Intel’s ‘next-generation IA processors with up to 8 cores,’ which the programme says will feature three levels of cache and a maximum TDP of 130W. As well as this, the programme says that the CPU family ‘has a coherent point-to-point link and integrates memory controller, power-management microcontroller and power-gate transistors.’
Although the codename of the CPU isn’t revealed, it’s clearly based on Intel’s new Nehalem architecture, which means it’s highly likely to be based on the Nehalem-EP design (pictured) mentioned in Intel’s CPU roadmap at IDF in August 2008. The Nehalem-EP platform will have two CPU sockets, each with independent triple-channel memory controllers, and it will also use Intel’s X58 chipset, meaning that it can also have PCI-E 2.0 graphics.
Basically, although it’s branded as an ‘enterprise’ platform, it could also be appropriate for enthusiasts looking to build a multi-threaded monster (that’s 32 threads with Hyper-Threading enabled) and even put in some decent graphics cards. Last year, Intel unveiled its first six-core ‘Dunnington’ Xeon CPUs in September, but these were still based on the Core 2 architecture rather than the Nehalem architecture.
Although eight-core processors make more sense for servers and workstations than desktop PCs at the moment, we’re still likely to see eight-core CPUs in desktop PCs in the near future. http://www.custompc.co.uk/news/605404/intel-to-unveil-eight-core-cpu-next-month.html# | |
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