Rarely the rebel, Intel looks to shake up the processor game with a six-core chip.

Some Intel slideware leaked onto the interweb shows the "Dunnington" version of Xeon arriving in the second half of this year with 6 cores. To date, the major chip makers have done two- and four-core processors, while Sun has an eight-core chip as well. Intel's upcoming chip is an apparent response to heavy lobbying from the Hex community.

We digress.

According to the slideware, Dunnington will be a 45nm (Penryn) chip that allows each core to share 3M B of L2 cache. There's also a shared 16MB Level3 cache.

The chip will ship as part of the Caneland platform and be pin compatible with Intel's Tigerton processors. In addition, it will work with the Clarksboro chipset.

There are two other items of note with Dunnington. For one, it appears to be Intel's most serious native multi-core processor to date. In addition, it will still rely on a front side bus(1066MHz). Blech.

It would seem that someone at Sun leaked this presentation by accident. That's what you get for picking up Sun as a customer, Intel. But you can still view the slides here. ®

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