Intel Unveils 6-Core Xeon 7400

JagsLive recommends CNet coverage that begins "Intel officially unveiled its six-core 'Dunnington' Xeon 7400 processor Monday ... As expected, Intel launched the Dunnington chip for high-end servers ... The Xeon 7400 is also one of the first Intel chips to have a monolithic design. In other words, all six cores will be on one piece of silicon. To date, for any processor having more than two cores, Intel has put two separate pieces of silicon ... inside one chip package."

Comments

Specs?

[sanosuke001]

There wasn't much in terms of technical specs in TFA. 6 cores, 16MB cache, anything else? Clock speed? 16MB of L2? L3? FSB? DDR(n)? (Though this is probably more up to the MB manufacturer) Why are they moving the memory controller off silicon? That in itself seems like a step backwards.

I would like to see them pushing consumer multi-core computing more personally. Get MS and other application manufacturers to support more cores. Servers have been doing it for ages and with pretty much all consumer level chips being dual core they should be pushing this angle more.

Though, them incorporating all of the cores on a single piece of silicon is definitely a step forward; the lack of additional specs and the notion of moving the memory controller make this seem like not as big of an announcement...

Re:Specs?

[morgan_greywolf]

I would like to see them pushing consumer multi-core computing more personally. Get MS and other application manufacturers to support more cores. Servers have been doing it for ages and with pretty much all consumer level chips being dual core they should be pushing this angle more.

And before anyone says...."yeah, but Linux/Mac OS X supports multi-cores out of the box".... Yes, yes it does. However, most of the applications don't actually benefit much from SMP by themselves. A few things like video conversion, but, for the most part, office suites, e-mail user agents, etc., do not actually benefit directly from SMP.

OTOH, why should they? Any processor made within the last five years is good enough for that stuff.

Re: "yes, triple core do exist"

[confused one]

What's wrong with that. Intel has sold defective processors for years, either binning them at a lower clock speed or trimming out chunks of cache and selling them as Celerons. If it can serve a purpose, does the job you need to get done, and it's available cheap... I don't see a problem here.