Intel's Dunnington : Thunderous Hexa Core Processor

Move over quad cores, here’s the new hexacore processor from Intel to steal your thunder. Intel has announced that it will be launching a native six core processor named Dunnington based on the Penryn architecture.

Although aimed at servers, we suspect that the migration to desktops and maybe even laptops won’t take long. According to the technical specifications, Dunnington uses a 45-nm die fabrication process. The six cores between them share three 3M L2 caches and a 16-MB Shared L3 cache. It also implements Quick Path interconnects, an Intel patented point-to-point data transfer interface replacing the traditional slower Front Side Bus. Data transfer rates would be 25.6 Gbps. It also has an integrated memory controller and supports DDR3-800 memory.

Simultaneous multithreading (SMT) is another feature that is widely touted. SMT enables each core to handle two threads at a time—speeds will see a huge increase. Implementation of this feature in Dunnington means that servers will be able to hand e more requests and speed up delivery of pages.

This slide from a leaked Sun presentation uncovers Intel's six-core Dunnington processor.