Posted on Thursday, January 29 2009 @ 20:50 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Intel announced it
will reveal details about its upcoming octa-core Nehalem-EX Xeon server processor at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), this conference will be held in San Francisco from February 8 to 12, 2009.
According to the official description of the session where Intel plans to announce details regarding the new processor, the 8-core 16-thread enterprise Intel Xeon processor based on code-named Nehalem micro-architecture has 2.3 billion transistors and is made using 45nm process technology. The chip that is known under Beckton code-name will have four point-to-point quick path interconnect links to connect to other processors as well as system I/O operating at up to 6.4GT/s. Like all Nehalem-class chips, this processor for expandable systems will feature built-in memory controller, which will have four channels. The processor will require a new platform with LGA-1567 sockets.
It is interesting to note that currently available code-named Bloomfield (Intel Core i7) processor features 731 million transistors, yet it has four cores, 1MB of L2 cache (256KB per core) as well as unified 8MB L3 cache. Considering the fact that the enterprise-class eight-core Intel Xeon chips have three times more transistors, it is highly likely that their cache sizes will be dramatically larger - some sources point to 24MB - and certain additional performance enhancements may be implemented.
