Having successfully established the Nehalem architecture-derived Core i7 series as the industry's fastest consumer processors available, and recently propagating the architecture to two-socket Xeon series for servers and high-end workstations, Intel is set to push up parallelism two-fold with the Nehalem-EX 8-core enterprise processor. The company will detail this new line of chips next week, although a commercial-launch can be expected only in late 2009 or early 2010.

The new chip will succeed the company's own Xeon E7000 "Dunnington" series 6-core processors, for having the highest available parallelism per socket. The 8 physical x86-64 processing cores will further feature HyperThreading technology, sending the logical-processor count to 16 threads per socket. Each processor packs 2.3 billion transistors. The processor will further be designed for systems with more than two sockets per board. Currently although server-builders sell 1U and 2U servers with more than two Nehalem quad-core processors, the system is designed by using two (or more) two-socket mainboards interconnected using Infiniband. The announcement will be made on May 26, in an address headed by Boyd Davis, Intel's general manager of Server Platforms Marketing Group.

Sitting tight on the desktop and server performance thrones with the Core i7 and Xeon Dunnington series procesors, Intel is looking to carry on with its product launch-cycle with the introduction of octo-core (8 cores) enterprise processors later this year. The company is expected to detail the industry about this upcoming processor series as early as next month at the Solid State Circuits conference in San Fransisco between February 8 and 12.

The processor in question will be based on the Intel Nehalem architecture and will consist of eight x86 processing cores, a massive transistor-count of 2.3 billion, and will be built on the company's current 45nm manufacturing process. It will hold 24 MB of L3 cache, a quad-channel memory interface and QuickPath Interconnect system interface. Furthermore, it is aimed at quad-socket server platforms. Intel will keep this only upto a presentation level at the conference and not a launch. It is expected to start off with quad-core Xeon processors based on the new architecture later in this quarter.

On September 15th Intel plans to fabricate the Intel Xeon 7400 Dunnington series processor, the company's last Penryn generation processor to be released. Xeon 7400 will mark the end of a previous server era, and after it the new Nehalem Core i7 processor family will start to appear in the fourth quarter. The Xeon 7400 will be Intel's first 6-core server chip. It will be produced using 45nm high-k process technology and will boast 16MB of L3 cache. The Xeon 7400 Dunnington series is also one of the first Intel chips to have a monolithic design, like Nehalem. In other words, all six cores will be on one piece of silicon. To date, for any processor having more than two cores, Intel has put two separate pieces of silicon - referred to as die - inside of one chip package. Server vendors announcing Xeon 7400 powered products will include Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, IBM and Unisys, according to Intel senior vice president Pat Gelsinger.

During the ongoing Intel Developer Forum (IDF) event, Intel has announced its first 6-core processor codenamed Dunnington. It will be branded as the Xeon X7460 and is expected to become available in servers beginning next month. Intel claims that systems using this chip already broke performance records, including an 8-socket 48-core IBM System x3950 M2 server, which became the first platform to break the 1 million tpmC barrier on the TPC-C benchmark.

Intel has also shed some light on the upcoming fleet of processors based on the Nehalem architecture. The first wave would only include quad-core, HyperThreading-enabled processors based on the Bloomfield core, also said is that they are planning to manufacture a second server derivative designed for the expandable server market (Nehalem-EX). Later, desktop processors based on the Havendale (dual-core) and Lynnfield (quad-core) processors, while the notebook/mobile platform will be offered the dual-core Auburndale and Lynnfield quad-core parts.

Intel is planning on serving a heaping pile of pain to AMD's revenue/stock figures again in a few months, by developing a six-core juggernaut. While AMD is still tweaking on a way to merely get four cores to work in tandem, Intel is hard at work shoving two more cores on one die. This six-core monstrosity will be succeeded by the even beefier Nehalem micro-architecture, which could have up to eight cores on one die. Most of the Dunnington project is still top-secret, but some say that Intel already has most of the hard work done.

Intel has already put together a die, the size of a postage stamp, with three dual-core 45nm Penryn chips on it sharing a 16MB L3 cache. Allegedly, we'll see the Dunnington in either Q2 or Q3, this year

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