Intel plans to launch its six-core Xeon server processor next month, with the extra cores and a larger cache giving the chip a performance advantage over the company’s existing quad-core chips.
Code-named Dunnington, the six-core Xeon processor is designed for servers that have four or more processors. Manufactured using a 45-nanometer production process, the chip should be the last new model based on Intel’s Penryn processor design before the release of the company’s first Nehalem chips in a few months’ time.
Unlike quad-core chips used in personal computers, where few applications are designed to tap the power of multi-core processors, commonly used server applications should make full use of the six-core Dunnington chip’s power.
The 45-nanometer production process used to make Dunnington makes possible many of the performance advances over Intel’s current chips, which are made using the company’s older 65-nanometer process.
Dunnington packs significantly more cache than its predecessor. The new chips will have 3M bytes of level 2 cache for each processor core, as well as a shared 16M-byte level 3 cache. By comparison, the Xeon 7300 chips have from 1M byte to 2M bytes of level 2 cache per core, and no level 3 cache.
The larger level 2 cache and addition of a level 3 cache — already a feature on Advanced Micro Device’s quad-core server chips — allows more data to be stored close to the processor cores, speeding up access to this information and boosting overall performance.