Intel preparing six-core Dunnington processor

Information has purportedly leaked on two upcoming Intel technologies. Foremost is a new Xeon CPU codenamed "Dunnington," which is said to use three dual-core processors based on 45nm Penryn technology. The CPU should use a shared 16MB L3 cache, but each core pairing is described as having 3MB of L2 memory. The chip is further said to have a 1,066MTs interconnect, and thermal design power rated under 130W.

The chip is expected to be a precursor however for Intel's "Nehalem" architecture, a replacement for Penryn. Like Penryn, Nehalem systems should use a 45nm build with SSE4 support, but will expand to handle two, four or eight cores, using four, eight and 16 threads. On-die memory controllers should be present, along with tri-channel DDR3 memory. Floating-point performance may more than double that of the newly-launched Penryn line, according to ZDNet columnist George Ou. Both Dunnington and Nehalem are expected to launch towards the end of 2008. [via Daily Tech]