Intel launches Six Core Xeon Monster Micro Processor

At an event today in San Francisco, Intel formally launched its new six-core Xeon 7400 processor, codenamed "Dunnington." The new chip is basically three dual-core Penryn processors packed onto a single processor die, along with a large pool of shared L3 cache and interconnect logic. With six cores and three levels of cache on one die, Dunnington is a 1.9-billion-transistor monster. This is almost as big as the company's latest 2-billion-transistor Itanium chip (launched in February), and it's quite a milestone for the x86 instruction set. In four- and eight-socket configurations, a supercomputer based on the new Xeon can now execute 48 or 96 simultaneous threads per node, a reality that's bound to help the architecture advance further in the high performance computing space. And at the very top end, there's also a 16-socket configuration on offer.

Intel has described the processor as follows: "Dunnington is the first IA (Intel Architecture) processor with six cores, is based on the 45nm high-k process technology, and has large shared caches."

Designed for virtualization environments, the latest Xeon-branded products offer frequencies up to 2.66 GHz and power levels starting at 50 watts.

Thanks to Google's Chrome and Microsoft's IE8, discrete processes are the new hotness, and more apps running simultaneously on your desktop is a great excuse to buy a CPU with more cores! On cue, Intel has officially launched its new Xeon 7400 processor, hitting 2.6 GHz on six cores and boasting an advertised 43 percent jump in performance over the lowly quad-core 7300, which had only half the 7400's 16MB of L3 cache. Impressive stuff, especially considering a bonus 10 percent drop in power consumption, but at $2729 for the top of the line model it's not exactly consumer-oriented.

“The arrival of these processors extends Intel’s lead in the high-end server segment. This new processor series helps IT manage increasingly complex enterprise server environments, providing a great opportunity to boost the scalable performance of multi-threaded applications within a stable platform infrastructure. With new features such as additional cores, large shared caches and advanced virtualization technologies, the Xeon 7400 series delivers record-breaking performance that will lead enterprises into the next wave of virtualization deployments,” said Tom Kilroy, Intel vice president and general manager of the digital enterprise group.

The Intel Xeon processor 7400 series has already set new four-socket and eight-socket world records on key industry benchmarks for virtualization, database, enterprise resource planning and e-commerce. IBM, following the record-setting 1.2 million tpmC result on its eight-socket System x 3950 M2 platform, delivers an all-time high result for four-socket servers on System x 3850 M2 server with a score of 684,508 tpmC on the TPC-C benchmark, which measures database performance in an online transaction processing environment.

Based on Intel's 45nm high-k process technology and reinvented transistors that use a Hafnium-based, high-k metal gate formula, the new Xeon 7400 series delivers exceptional performance improvements with lower power consumption. This delivers almost 50 percent better performance in some cases and up to 10 percent reduction in platform power.