Intel IDF Day 1 - Quad Core, Santa Rosa And More

MojoKid writes "From demos of the new Alan Wake game engine on a 3.73GHz overclocked Quad-Core QX6700 to design showcases with a wafer of 80-core teraflop capable chips, Intel's IDF opening day was brimming with tech-wonder from the company affectionately known as Chipzilla. Paul Otellini also showed pics of upcoming fab facilities in Arizona (Fab 32) and Israel (Fab 28). In total, Intel will have three 45nm fabs by the end of next year at an investment of about $9B, all targeted 45nm manufacturing processes. Finally, a bevy of Quad-Core Kentsfield-based systems are shown here, with Dell and Voodoo's offering looking especially swank."

Comments

Re:Core 2 Challenge

[TheRaven64]

Unless they are running two challenges, it is to design a Mac Mini-like box to be marketed under the ViiV brand. The prize money is (as I recall) $600,000 for product development, and $400,000 for marketing. I don't know what this will do for the Apple-Intel relationship; paying people to compete harder with your customers isn't exactly the kind of thing that makes suppliers popular.

Re:Catchup again's Sun's 8 core UltraSparc T1

[TheRaven64]

Apples to oranges. The T1 is a superb chip for some workloads, and an appalling one for others. The T2, which has an FPU for each core (unlike the shared one in the T1) should do a bit better, but there are still a lot of workloads where the T1 does very badly. This is why Sun still sell UltraSPARC IV+ chips as well, and these are only dual-core.

Re:They're not quad-core though

[yabos]

There's more to it than just the core. There's all the rest of the CPU which includes cache(usually shared for dual core while separate on dual CPUs) and the rest of the interconnects for connecting to the motherboard and whatnot.