Intel previews new multicore devices

Intel senior vice president Pat Gelsinger outlined the six core 1.9billion transistor processor codenamed ‘Dunnington’ and a 2bn transistor Itanium processor codenamed ‘Tukwila’. He also disclosed a number of technical features on what Intel described as ‘two important products’: Nehalem, its next generation processor family; and Larrabee, a future multicore product. Nehalem will be a dynamically scalable processor architecture, said by Intel to provide ‘dramatic performance and energy improvements’. The company envisages it being applied from notebooks to servers. Scalable from two to eight cores and with simultaneous multithreading, the processor will have four times the memory bandwidth of Intel’s highest performing processors. In particular, the device is likely to feature more than 730million transistors and an 8Mbyte level 3 cache. Gelsinger also gave details of Larrabee, which is intended to compete in the emerging visual computing market. The architecture, which includes a single instruction, multiple data vector processing unit, features a new set of vector instructions with integer and floating point arithmetic. The architecture, which supports multicore processors, is said to meet the demands of visual computing and other inherently parallel workloads.