Intel has moved over quad core and announced that it will be launching a native six core processor named Dunnington based on the Penryn architecture later this year. Although it is aimed at servers, it maybe ported for desktops and laptops.

The Intel Dunnington processor uses a 45-nm die fabrication process. The six cores share three 3MB L2 caches and a 16MB L3 cache. It implements Quick Path interconnects an Intel pateneted point-to-point data transfer interface replacing the traditional slower FSB. Data transfer rates would be 25.6 Gbps. It also has an integrated memory controller and supports DDR3 800 Memory.

Simultaneous multithreading is another feature that is widely touted. SMT enables each core to handle two threads at a time, this will result in huge speed increase. Al these features implemented in Dunnington means that servers will be able to handle more requests and speed up delivery of pages.

This is great news coming from Itel... Hopefully, if this CPU is targetead to home users aswell, it would lowert the cost of quad-core CPU's... But I'm affraid that for some time, Dunnington will be primariliy for use in servers, similarly to Pentium Pro, in its time...

But none the less, it's good to see CPU manufacturers battling each other, and making new stuff, and thus, making nice breakthroughs in technology... And I'm a atechnology addict

Sounds cool! When can I get mine?