The good news is that Intel's decided to go one step ahead of quad-core and add two more cores to their Xeon line of processors. The product, codenamed Dunnington, will sell as the Xeon 7400. The bad news? Well, it's the Xeon line--server processors, not desktop. The six-core Xeon, incidentally, will be Intel's last Penryn-based processor before the product line moves on to the highly anticipated Nehalem platform.
Before you start cursing Intel for depriving you of the gaming joys of six-core processing, consider that today's games don't even exploit your quad-core properly--getting games to multi-thread (which is what lets programs distribute the load over many processors) has been a task that game programmers are still grappling with. Server software, however, has loved multiple processors for ages, so the new Xeon should be a blessing in the server department.
The 7400 will also sport all six cores on the same silicon wafer--the quad-core processors thus far featured two separate dual-core processors in the same package.
Of course, this is an obvious poke in AMD s eye--they aim to release their six-core "Istanbul" server processor only next year, by which time Intel will have hit the market with another winner. We've long expected AMD to pull another Athlon 64 and blow Intel sky high, but with the latter's aggressiveness, we wonder if this author's favorite might be squished into oblivion.
Source: Techtree
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