Maximum PC Dunnington RSS Feed

AMD's "Istanbul" Chip to Launch Next Tuesday

Andy Salisbury — Thu, 28 May 2009 17:01:46 -0500

According to reports, AMD’s six-core Istanbul server processor is set to be unveiled this upcoming Tuesday.

The chip is slated for its official unveiling at the Computex conference on June 2nd. It is meant to rival Intel’s Dunnington processor, and will sport 6MB of L3 cache to share amongst the cores. Each core will also have 512 KB of L2 cache per, and will presumably feature DDR3 support (depending on the socket).

According to the chip’s lead architect, Hans de Vries, AMD will be pitting two of these against one of Intel’s offering, thanks to the size of the chip. The Istanbul chip is reported to only take up 300 square millimeters, while the Dunnington is expected to take up 700 square millimeters.

Edit: Turns out that 700 million square millimeters is about 4.3x the size of a volleyball court. Mistake corrected.

Image Credit: AMD

AMD is Not Impressed by Intel's Dunnington

Paul Lilly — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 11:43:26 -0500

In case you missed it, Intel earlier this week officially released its Dunnington-based 7400 server CPUs. Dunnington has garnered attention in the press for being a six-core processor, and also for being the first Intel chip to sport a monolithic design, meaning all six cores come on a single die. Dunnington's predecessor, the 7300 series Tigerton, was a quad-core processor two dual-core chips wedged onto a single slice of silicon.

But Dunnington is no big deal, according to AMD. Jon Fruehe, worldwide market development manager for the rival chip maker, dubbed Dunnington as nothing more than a "benchmark chip" and a "placeholder" until Intel can move away from an external memory controller.

Fruehe also huffed at Intel having the first six-core CPU, saying it's just a glued together triple-dual core processor with 50 percent more cores than the quad-core and costing 50 percent more, but only offering 30 percent more performance. He also pooh-poohed the 130W TDP rating (early reports indicate first run Core i7 processors will also be rated at 130W), and downplayed Tigerton's success, saying market share gains can be attributed to AMD being late with Barcelona.

Is Fruehe's criticism of Intel's Dunnington architecture valid, or did someone just take a whiz in his Wheaties?

Image Credit: ICanHasCheezburger.com

Intel Officially Launches Six-Core Xeon Processors, Boasts 50% Performance Boost

Norman Chan — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 18:54:20 -0500

Intel today announced the official release of their Dunnington-based Xeon 7400 server CPU. The six-core chip is monolithic, meaning that all six cores are on one die, and is the first Xeon CPU to sport that design. The previous 7300 series CPU, dubbed Tigerton, was a quad-core processor with two dual-core chips on a single module (like existing quad-core consumer chips). As expected, Dunnington is still of the Penryn architecture (45nm High-K manufacturing process), and will be compatible with current Tigerton Socket 604 motherboards.

Speed-wise, Intel claims a 50% performance increase in the 7400 over the 7300 series CPU based on TPC-E database benchmark testing (TPC-E simulates the online transaction workload of a large brokerage firm). More impressive is Intel’s claim that even with the improved performance, Dunnington’s energy efficiency actually means it uses 10% lower power than the previous generation. The gains are largely attributed to the presence of a new 16MB level-3 cache, in addition to the extra compute power of two more cores. Xeon 7400 CPUs will launch at 2.66Ghz with either four or six core, and will be priced from $856 to $2729.

What does this mean for consumers? Unfortunately, not much. Intel has no current plans to release a six-core CPU to the mainstream market, and few applications would be able to scale well enough to take full advantage of the additional two cores. Intel seems to be pushing Nehalem for the consumer market, which will launch as a quad-core. Dunnington customers – large Web 2.0 companies like Myspace – will be the ones who benefit most from the extra performance and power efficiency, which may enable them to develop compute-intensive features like high-definition video sharing.

Rumor: 6-Core Dunnington CPUs Coming From Intel Next Week

Paul Lilly — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 10:52:27 -0500

There's no official word yet, but there's speculation that Intel might release it's six-core Dunnington chips next week at VMWare's VMWorld conference in Las Vegas. Dunnington isn't being aimed at the desktop crowd and will instead target the server market, so if Intel was looking to make a splash with its new CPUs before Nehalem debuts, VMWorld would be the place to do it.

For those that missed our coverage earlier this month, Intel's Xeon 7400 series Dunnington processor will not only be the first six-core CPU, but also the first Intel chip to sport a monolithic design, meaning all six cores will come on one slice of silicon. Current generation chips feature multiple cores in one package. Despite being monolithic in nature, Dunnington will still use an external memory controller, which Intel hopes to offset with a generous amount of cache. The six cores will share a beefy 16MB of L3 cache, and 3MB of L2 cache (9MB total).

Image Credit: Intel

Rumor: Intel is Ready to Announce a Six-Core Chip

Paul Lilly — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 10:54:29 -0500

On September 15th, Intel is expected to unveil its Xeon 7400 series Dunnington processor. What makes the server chip so special is it will be the first six-core processor, and likely the last Penryn to make a debut before the Nehalem microarchitecture takes over starting with the Core i7.

In another first, Dunnington will be the first Intel chip to sport a monolithic design, meaning all six cores will come on one slice of silicon. By contrast, the Core 2 Quad and four-core Xeon processors to date integrate two dual-core chips in a single package.

In addition to having six cores, the server market hopes to get big performance gains from the large 16MB of shared L3 cache. According to Intel senior vice president Pat Gelsinger, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell will have product announcements related to the Xeon 7400 series in September.

Image Credit: Intel

Intel’s details Nehalem, Larrabee and hexa-core CPU plans

Gordon Mah Ung — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 20:57:53 -0500

If there’s one message Intel wants the world to take away from its Monday morning sit down with the enthusiaist media, it’s that all pistons are firing full bore.

The company demonstrated working silicon from its upcoming Nehalem CPU, talked up details about its return to the world of discrete graphics, and even said it had a hexa-core CPU ready to go. That's six dies in one package, for everyone who flunked tenth-grade Greek.

The biggest news announcement wasn't Nehalem, but Intel's reentry into the discrete graphics market. Although light on concrete details, Intel said Larrabee, the first discrete part, would not be ass-bad integrated graphics. Instead, it would be full-on performance GPU. Larrabee would feature “many” cores and performance would scale to the teraflop range. The new graphic part will also include a new vector instruction set and leverage Intel’s strong tool set to ease the pain of developing massively-parallel, general-purpose apps on GPUs. Intel believes that its tools will set it apart from ATI’s GPGPU and Nvidia’s CUDA frameworks, which offer similar functionality. Both initiatives are slowly gaining traction in the scientific and animation industries, but the tools to utilize GPUs for general purpose computing are still rough. Of course, this doesn't apply to consumers, who simply want to play the latest games on their PC, but Larrabee will cater to PC developers as well. The part will ship with full support for DirectX and OpenGL.

Intel didn’t detail which flavor of DirectX would be supported, but it would be current. Intel expects the first Larrabee parts to see the light of day sometime in late 2009 or early 2010. The company also cleared up some misconception about Larrabee. Many thought Larrabee cores would be the basis of its integrated graphics platform but on Monday, Intel denied that saying that it would continue to develop an integrated graphics core for normal computing. Integrated designs, however, will likely move from the chipset into the CPU package itself.

Besides Larrabee, Intel also released more on its upcoming Nehalem chip. Based on a 45nm process, Nehalem will utilize a modular design that will let Intel build CPUs featuring different numbers of cores and different cache configs, as well as integrated graphics and memory controllers. The initial consumer enthusiast version is codenamed Tylersburg. It will be a native quad-core design, and each core will feature a Hyperthreading-like capability to execute two threads simultaneously. Tylersburg will feature L3 cache and an integrated tri-channel DDR3 controller. That should offer boatloads of bandwidth but it’ll also mean more complicated memory configurations.

The demonstration Tylersburg machine featured six DIMM slots. To operate in tri-mode, three DIMMs have to be populated. However, the demonstration machine ran fine with just two DIMM slots occupied.

The desktop version of Nehalem is already up and running.

As expected, Nehalem does away with the front-side bus. The chip will communicate with the chipset and other CPUs via a high-speed interconnect Intel has dubbed Quick Path Interconnect. Tylersburg is expected near the end of this year. Intel also demonstrated its hexa-core CPU. Codenamed Dunnington, the chip is essentially a six-core Penryn.

Should upgraders expect such a beast to fill their existing Socket 775 boards? No, Intel said. Dunnington will only find a home in Xeon boards. Intel said that while there’s been some discussion about Dunnington on desktop, the resources to make it work in a desktop configuration don’t make fiscal sense. And since Dunnington will hit just after Nehalem, the company expects most performance desktop users to adopt Nehalem. Dunnington’s best fit is for workstation and servers where it should work as a drop-in replacement for current quad-core Xeons.

On tap beyond Nehalem, Intel said to expect Westmere, a 32nm shrink of Nehalem with some microarchitecture enhancements to keep performance up. A more significant upgrade is expected with the Sandy Bridge CPU core in 2009 or 2010.