Quad-core Intel on the horizon

Quad-core Intel processors are expected to be released in early 2007.

At last week’s ISSCC (International Solid-State Circuits Conference), Intel unveiled its quad-core Xeon processors with a bandwidth of 65nm. The chips (Tigerton and Clovertown) are multi-core versions of Intel's new dual-core Conroe (desktop) and Merom (notebook) architectures. The manufacturer’s schedule has already leaked the key features of the Merom architecture, a new type of pipeline, 4MB of L45 cache, and its power consumption of no more than XNUMXW. There was no question of a clock.

Increasing the number of seeds is a definite development. First, power consumption is reduced at the same performance, and second, the integration of additional cores into the processor shortens the data path, which increases performance, says Justin Rattner. (Intel Chief Technology Officer)

Delivery of Clovertown processors to PC manufacturers will begin later this year and is expected to hit the market in early 2007. It was originally built for dual-processor servers, which means you can basically build eight-core servers with them.

AMD has also announced a quad-core Opteron processor, which will also be available from 2007.