Intel Developers Forum roundup: four cores now, 80 cores later

While we've been busy covering lotsofothernewstoday, Intel has also been clamoring for the spotlight -- Otellini and Co. had a number of announcements about the future of processors at today's Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. Firstly, the quad-core Core 2 Extreme and Core 2 Quad chips have been officially unveiled and slated for production, with the former running in servers this fall, and the latter appearing in desktops by 2007. Of course, these chips are the same ones we've been hearing about for the last seven months, and it appears that DigiTimes' previous prediction that these procs would debut in November was correct. Secondly, Intel's CEO (pictured at right) told the audience that the chipmaker has already built a prototype with 80 processing cores on a single chip that can perform a trillion floating-point operations per second -- that's a teraflop to the layman -- and is aiming to ready commercial versions within five years. Otellini also teased everyone with announcements of the new 45nm-based architecture, code-named "Nehalem", which will ship in 2008, and the new "Gesher" 32nm chips by 2010, which would allow for a 310 percent increase in Intel processors' performance-per-Watt by that time -- hey, better late than never. Finally, in a move that will surely be met with angry glares from Cupertino, Intel is putting up a $1 million bounty for a Viiv-based Mac mini killer, something that will turn a traditional living room PC into something that is "sexy, stylish and small" (you mean the mini's not?) as determined by a panel that includes judges from PC Magazine, GQ and of course, Otellini himself. Be sure to check the couple extra pics on the next page.

Read - Quad-core chips coming in November
Read - First quad-core servers, desktops coming
Read - 80-core chips coming by 2011
Read - Higher performance-per-watt
Read - $1 million bounty

[Photos: Ricardo]