Intel's Xeon 7400 Processor

The latest news on Intel unveiled the fact that the company plans to release its six-core ‘Dunnington’ processor at the VMWorld conference in Las Vegas, next week.It is aimed at blade/server market.

The new Dunnington will need an external memory controller, the same as Intel's current line of processors, yet the company is confident that the large cache size the CPU features will help it get over any memory limitation. The giant chip manufacturer will release its first models of the next-generation Nehalem processors in the fourth quarter, which will feature an integrated memory controller supposed to solve memory bottlenecks.

Intel chose to build quad-core chips by taking two dual-core chips and putting them into a special package. This approach was scorned by the chip design purists, but it allowed Intel to get quad-core chips out quickly while AMD struggled for a year with the technical challenges of building Barcelona, a quad-core chip with all the cores on one die.


The Xeon 7400, as well as other upcoming Intel chips, will feature all cores on a single piece of silicon. The current family of processors feature multiple cores shaped into one package. This differs from AMD's approach, which has monolithic processors, yet Intel got to the market faster this way. Although there are voices that shout against Intel's technology, there are few users that really care how the CPU is made as long as it works just fine.



The Dunnington chip is designed for the blade/server market, and this explains why Intel would have it released at VMWare’s VMWorld conference. As the virtualization of operating systems catches more and more ground these days, with one OS running inside another OS, the new processor will most likely attract many of the system administrators attending the show.

Dunnington will arrive just before the Nehalem generation of chips, which will be quite a mishmash of designs. Intel will have a wide variety of Nehalem chips, including ones with two, four, and eight cores, chips with up to 16 threads, and some with integrated graphics.


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