Intel Dunnington : Six Cores Processor !

After months Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) launched four cores onto one chip, Intel is set to take that concept a step further. Intel plans to develop Dunnington processor, which appears to be a six-core server chip where all six cores are part of a single chip. Intel had previously hinted that Dunnington wo -

Intel indicates that Dunnington has six 45-nanometer Penryn-class cores integrated onto a single die. Each pair of Penryn cores shares 3MBs of Level 2 cache, and each of the six cores can access 16MBs of Level 3 cache. That's a ton of space to store frequently used instructions, which could be a help for the chip in avoiding the front-side bus bottleneck to the main memory that's still apparently in the works for Dunnington.
Intel chose to build quad-core chips by taking two dual-core chips and putting them into - a special package. This strategy was scorned by the chip design purists, but it also allowed Intel to get quad-core chips out quickly while AMD struggled for a year with the technical challenges associated with building Barcelona, a quad-core chip with all the cores on one die.

Dunnington will arrive just before the Nehalem generation of chips. Intel will have a wi - de variety of Nehalem chips, including ones with two, four, and eight cores, chips with up to 16 threads, and some with integrated graphics.(dna)