Intel’s Six-Core Dunnington and Nehalem Microarchitecture Get Official

The pair of 45nm Intel chips that Sun oh-so-kindly leaked last month just got all official-like. Dunnington is “the first IA (Intel Architecture) processor with 6-cores, is based on the 45nm high-k process technology, and has large shared caches.” Six cores, exciting! But not as exciting as Nehalem, which is Intel’s “dynamically scalable” new processor microarchitecture which’ll bring “dramatic performance and energy improvements” to Intel’s chips. And that means what?

The platform will scale from two to eight cores, and eventually from “notebooks to servers.” That’s the scalable part, so you’ll see it everywhere. Simultaneous Multi-Threading will let each core run two threads at once, plus it quadruples the memory-bandwidth of the current top-o’-the-line Xeons. It’s also got an 8MB level-3 cache, Quickpath interconnects (up to 25.6GB per second), integrated memory controller (AMD what?) and supports up to DDR3-1333 memory, plus a bunch of other hardcore geek stuff, which you can scope out at Intel. [Intel]