Rumour control: Intel to introduce six core CPUs

Posted at: 10:24am 25th February 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

12-core workstations here we come!

If you can bolt two Core 2 Duo processors together and cheekily call it a quad-core chip, then there's no reason why you can't add another one and call it a six-core chip. Apparently, this is what Intel has planned after putting six 45nm dual-core Penryn chips in a single package.

According to developers' site Eclipse, the new chip is codenamed Dunnington, and is intended to be the last Penryn-based follow-up to Harpertown before Intel switches over to the new Nehalem architecture. Nehalem will be able to support eight cores, and will also have an integrated memory controller, but the new Dunnington Xeons will still use a front side bus.

The site claims that Dunnington-based Xeons will feature a huge 16MB Level 3 cache and will use Intel's Clarksboro chipset.

Via The Inquirer