Prior to Intel Shanghai IDF from April 2 - 3, 2008, news are boiling over the internet that Intel will launch a 6-core processor, Dunnington, in 2H 08. Dunnington would be Intel’s first monolithic design since its original Core 2 Duo chips released in 2006. A glimpse of the Intel’s six-core Dunnington processor is available on Intel’s website (see slide below). The slide 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 (Ref).

Dunnington will be Intel’s last generation of 45nm Penryn processor. The Penryn is the tick version of Intel 45nm processor. The next generation tock version of Intel 45nm processor, Nehalem, is expected to launch end of the year. In the face of challenge from AMD’s quad core processor Barcelona, Intel has chosen to build quad-core chips by taking two dual-core chips and putting them into a special package. This approach was scorned by chip design purists who prefer AMD’s monolithic quad-core design. However, it seems to work for Intel by quickly getting the quad-core chips out to the market. Now, Dunnington will be Intel’s direct response to AMD’s quad-core Barcelona.

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On Monday, 10th Sep 2007, AMD officially launched the world’s most advanced x86 processor ever designed and manufactured, and the first native x86 quad-core microprocessor, Barcelona. The initial Barcelona quad-core Opteron products consist of 4 models: 8350 (75W, 2GHz), 8347 (75W, 1.9 GHz), 8347 HE (55W, 1.9GHz) and 8346 HE (55W, 1.8GHz). From the public news, the 2.5-GHz Barcelona product will be coming very soon (Ref). For more information on the new Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor, please visit multicore.amd.com. Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor pricing can be found at www.amd.com/pricing. A good review article by AnandTech could be found here. To gain more insight on the new Barcelona processor, you could also listen to the audio interview by EDN with Randy Allen, corporate vice president in charge of AMD’s server and workstation products division:

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We expect that in the coming weeks, there would be extensive performance benchmarking between AMD’s quad-core Opteron and Intel’s Xeon by various parties. So, let’s wait and see the verdict From the public news, AMD also plans to introduce dual-core and quad-core Phenom processors for PCs by year end. The Phenom processors would be using the new core architecture design similar to the Barcelona (Ref).

Below is a video in which Randy Allen (Corporate VP, Server and Workstation Division) discusses AMD’s superior quad-core processor architecture with the launch of the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor