Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Intel Interesting

Apologies for the corny title, but I couldn't stop myself! :-)

The most immediate news is the 6-core Dunnington, expected to release in the second half of this year. It looks like it has a 3-way split 9MB L2 cache, 16 MB of L3 cache and micro-architecture based on the Penryn. The kicker is that it only has a TDP of 80W!

There is more and more information about the Nehalem now becoming available. We'd already heard about the integrated DDR3 memory controller and simultaneous multi-threading (the successor to hyperthreading). The latest update is that the Nehalem will feature a QuickPath interconnect capable of transfer rates of upto 25.6 GBps. And it is not just more memory bandwidth and multiple cores that will improve performance, it turns out that the Nehalem will increase the OOO execution window to 128 uOps (from 96 on the Penryn) - so individual cores are also going to get faster!

In the longer term Sandy Bridge - the second of Intel's 32 nm processors - is going to have a 256-bit wide SSE execution unit. The only complaint I have about this is that it is 2 years away from shipping. :-)

See here, here and here for more details.

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