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Intel to Launch Eight-core Nehalem-EX This Month

Intel will release its fastest and highly anticipated eight-core Nehalem-EX server processor later this month, a company executive said last week. The processor will be targeted at four-socket servers, said Shannon Poulin, Xeon platform director at Intel. Each physical core will be able to run two threads simultaneously, giving the chip 64 virtual processing cores on servers. Intel has said that server chips based on Westmere will contain up to six cores. The company last month said the six-core chip contained 1.17 billion transistors and 12MB of cache. The six-core chips will deliver improved performance and power savings compared to earlier quad-core chips, according to Intel. The Westmere-EP chips will fall under the Xeon product line and will be made using the 32-nanometer process. The last refresh for server chips was in March last year, when the company announced a range of Xeon 5500 series and 3500 series chips based on the Nehalem architecture. The chips were made using the 45-nm process.

Intel is targeting the chip at high-end systems running data-intensive applications such as databases. IBM earlier this week said it would implement Nehalem-EX chips in its System x EX5 servers. The chip will be made using the 45-nanometer process, and be based on the Nehalem microarchitecture, which integrates the memory controller and improves system speed by cutting data bottlenecks that plagued Intel's earlier chips. Intel is also including new technologies like MCA recovery error correction that could make servers more fault tolerant and provide greater uptime, he said. The processor will be able to detect system errors originating in the CPU or system memory and correct them by working with the operating system. Some of these technologies have been adapted from Intel's high-end Itanium processors, which are based on a separate chip architecture and go into fault-tolerant systems.

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Posted by | Mon, Mar 08, 2010 - 10:46 AM