Intel gives idea about six cores, Nehalem and Larrabee

Intel has come up with a brief idea about its upcoming six core technology as well as Nehalem and graphics chip, Larrabee.

According to Pat Gelsinger, a senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, "Development is proceeding quite smoothly."

He talked about all the technologies which Intel is either going to launch or within coming two years.

Of these, the Six core Chip, code-named Dunnington will be released first. It is expected to be launched within this year or early next year.

It has 1.9 billion transistors and 16MB of Level 3 cache and will be built with Intel's new 45 nanometer technology.

"The big cache and six cores will give customers a nice bump in performance," said Gelsinger discussing the company’s road map and its upcoming Intel Developer Forum. "We're quite excited about it."

Intel's new Nehalem is a redesign of the Core architecture for 45nm and the components like the CPU cores, the QuickPath Interconnect, the integrated memory controller, even on board graphics can be combined in various ways to meet various needs.

A 32nm version of Nehalem, codenamed Westmere, is also planned for the year 2009.

Nehalem also has a feature called Simultaneous Multi-Threading, which is the next version of the Hyper-Threading. The basic working of this involves each core managing two threads simultaneously. Thus it will be very useful for the database work.

Intel is also working on the graphics and transformation of visual computing. For this it will be launching a product called Larrabee, which will be shipped in 2009 or in 2010.

Larrabee is Intel's attempt to compete with Nvidia and AMD's ATI division, which are two top graphics chip makers'. Larrabee processors will use a global cache shared by all cores and should scale to the multi-teraflop level.

However Santa Clara, Calif.-based Nvidia does not seem to be worried by Intel’s product.

"If you look at every other time they've launched a discrete graphics part, it's a failure. The reason is that our rate of innovation is so much faster on the GPU side than theirs is," said the spokesperson.