The 32nm dual-core
Clarkdale processors that recently made
their debut are about to pave the way for Intel's next performance crown chaser, the six-core
Gulftown. You might've known that already, but Intel's decided to furnish us with the above slide detailing the particular differences between the two dies, with the most notable being the whopping 1.17
billion transistors that the new CPU will be composed of. The major attraction of Clarkdale chips lies in their
power efficiency and
competent integrated GPU, but the Gulftown focus will be firmly on the high end. Hence, there's no integrated graphics, but the built-in memory controller supports three channels of DDR3 RAM and even plays nice with lower-powered
1.35-volt sticks. There's also confirmation that the
forthcoming hex-core chip will fit inside the familiar LGA-1366 socket, so if you bought a
high end Core i7, worry not, you'll be able to replace your still blisteringly quick CPU with an even faster beast. Quad-core variants -- by virtue of disabling a pair of cores -- are on the cards as well, while Intel also took the opportunity to delve into questions of 1Tbps+ bandwidth interconnects and its
80-core processor project, but you'll have to hit up the links below to learn more about those.
posted February 4th 2010 5:29AM
Why are they telling the photos to die?
OTOH Clarkdale is a really goofy-sounding name for a processor...
@crapple Haha! Good one. Seriously LOL'd.
@crapple
My first thought was, "How will Kodak respond to the death threats?"
@crapple so much hate
I'm surprised that 6-core is still going to fit in a LGA 1366 socket. I know the Opteron 6-core that was released a while back had a different socket configuration, and AMD's prototype 12-core CPU had an entirely different socket pin layout.
Is it because of improved die size-- 32nm perhaps?
@octoberasian That's correct. The 32nm Gulftown will actually have a smaller die size (240mm squared) that the current high end quad-core Core i7s.
at this point, developers are going to need some sort of seperate processor to dictate where each core diverts its attention to where
@Captain Underpants and the Bring
They use the sixth core for precognitive computing, it can see 21.175 nanoseconds into the future and route threads accordingly.