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Details of New Intel Dunnington and Nehalem Architectures Leaked
Daily Tech is reporting that details about Intel's new processor models were leaked over the weekend. Both the six core Dunnington and Nehalem architectures were featured in this leak. "Dunnington includes 16MB of L3 cache shared by all six processors. Each pair of cores can also access 3MB of local L2 cache. The end result is a design very similar to the AMD Barcelona quad-core processor; however, each Barcelona core contains 512KB L2 cache, whereas Dunnington cores share L2 cache in pairs. [...] Nehalem is everything Penryn is -- 45nm, SSE4, quad-core -- and then some. For starters, Intel will abandon the front-side bus model in favor of QuickPath Interconnect; a serial bus similar to HyperTransport."
The L3 cache is 16MB. Each pair of cores shares 3MB of L2 cache. They aren't the same thing at all.
Note: if you're tempted to mod this up, don't. I rehashed the summary.
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT082807020032
Yes, I do. I don't often have something running in the background thats really active though, like a compiler. A typical setup would be something like World of Warcraft, Ventrillo, Firefox, Wireshark (watching WoW traffic is a hobby during wipe recovery), and stuff like that. The second core still isn't particularily taxed.
In order to spike both cores, I need to start something like a compiler or video encoder, which is going to also eat I/O time. Its the I/O that slows down WoW more then the CPU usage. Since adding four more cores drastically increases my parallel processing power (which I don't need more of now), and doesn't do a thing for my I/O throughput (which I do need more of), its not really all that helpful.
Thats why this doesn't excite me a whole lot. We were already at a spot where a single core is more then fast enough for a majority of mainstream users, and now we're going to give out six of them? Other then being able to run spyware more effeciently, whats actually being gained?
(There are people who will benefit from this type of thing, of course. I just don't see the mainstream market as part of that group.)
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Please check your facts, AMD doesn't _own_ HyperTransport, so why would Intel have to pay them anything? HyperTransport can be used royalty-free by anyone joining the HT consortium. Yes, AMD is a member of the consortium, just like a lot of other tech companies such as NVIDIA, one of AMD/ATi's biggest competitors. AMD are not the owners of the technology nor are they in control of the HT consortium. They are simply one of the most visible tech companies that has strongly embraced HT in their products.