Details "leaked" on upcoming Intel hexcore chips

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I hope Intel’s PR department is getting paid extra for all the effort they have to go through making these announcements look like leaks.

Anyway, according to the DailyTech the story is that Intel briefed Sun on futures last month and Sun posted the thing on its public web servers over the weekend. Of interest: Dunnington and Nehalem.

From DT

Dunnington, Intel’s 45nm six-core Xeon processor from the Penryn family, will succeed the Xeon Tigerton processor. Whereas Tigerton is essentially two 65nm Core 2 Duo processors fused on one package, Dunnington will be Intel’s first Core 2 Duo processor with three dual-core banks. …The end result is a design very similar to the AMD Barcelona quad-core processor; however, each Barcelona core contains 512KB L2 cache, whereas Dunnington cores share L2 cache in pairs.

Dunnington is supposed to be pin-compatible with Tigerton and shipping in late 2008. Then there’s Nehalem — 45 nm quadcore — with QuickPath and no front-side bus, and on-die memory controllers.

As noted by ZDNet blogger George Ou, the slides contain some rudimentry benchmarks for Nehalem and other publicly available processors. From this slide deck, Ou estimates Nehalem’s SPEC*fp_rate_base2006 at 163 and the SPEC*int_rate_base2006 at 176. By contrast, Intel’s fastest Harpertown Xeon X5482 pulls a measly 80 and 122 SPEC fp and int rate_base2006.