Intel Releases First Six-Core This Month
In the beginning (circa 1970) there were the mono-core CPUs, and they’ve dominated the market for more than three decades. The last four years brought the dual and quad-cores and the next logical step looks to be six and eight cores. Intel mentioned that Nehalem six-cores will be introduced later in 2009, but it looks like the Core i7 CPUs won’t be the first six-cores to hit the market from Intel. The CPU giant already intends to release a series of native six-cores in the second half of September, but it’ll be server-oriented.
The native six-core CPUs bear the Xeon 7400 brand name and were codenamed Dunnington. According to CNET, the Xeon 7400 series will be manufactured at 45nm and will feature a shared 16MB L3 cache. The new CPUs are socket compatible with the previous Xeon 7300 series, so there won’t be any need to buy new motherboards. The 7400 series is also compatible with the Xeon MP standard and are intended for systems using four or more CPU sockets.
Don’t expect to see any cheap components here as these are server CPUs after all. The top of the line model – Xeon X7460 – is expected to be available for $2,651, but there are cheaper models going all the way down to just a little over $1,000. Anyway, I still think that a quad-crossfire setup with four Radeon HD 4870X2 graphics cards performs better than a 24-core server.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader by FeedBurner.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment