Intel Details Upcoming Gulftown Six-Core Processor

MojoKid writes "With the International Solid-State Circuits Conference less than a week away, Intel has released additional details on its upcoming hexa-core desktop CPU, next gen mobile, and dual-core Westmere processors. Much of the dual-core data was revealed last month when Intel unveiled their Clarkdale architecture. However, when Intel set its internal goals for what its calling Westmere 6C, the company aimed to boost both core and cache count by 50 percent without increasing the processor's thermal envelope. Westmere 6C (codename Gulftown) is a native six-core chip. Intel has crammed 1.17 billion transistors into a die that's approximately 240mm sq. The new chip carries 12MB up L3 (up from Nehalem's 8MB) and a TDP of 130W at 3.33GHz. In addition, Intel has built in AES encryption instruction decode support as well as a number of improvements to Gulftown's power consumption, especially in idle sleep states."

Comments

Re:Are most programmes multi-processor?

[SmilingBoy]

Wrong question. When was the last time my computer was running a single thread that could use 100% CPU for more than a few milliseconds. Answer: All the time. For example whenever I open Slashdot with Firefox. I rather have less cores at higher speed than more cores.

Re:Are most programmes multi-processor?

[TheRaven64]

Most programs can't be written to take full advantage of even one core. Most of the things that you do on a computer will run happily on a 1GHz CPU and still not bring usage over 50% more than occasionally. Most of the things that will tax a modern CPU can be made parallel, so will scale quite well to a number of cores. Even if your processor intensive task isn't using multiple cores, you still benefit a bit from being able to move everything else onto another core. With the recent Intel chips you also have 'Turbo Boost' (horrible name) which underclocks some cores while overclocking others, giving one core a speed boost for that CPU-eating single-threaded app while keeping the power usage and heat generation output. To prevent hotspots on the die, you can move the process around between the cores, giving each a boost for a little while.