Intel announced Monday that it expects to ship a six-core processor to OEMs in the second half of this year. With 1.9 billion transistors and 16MB of L3 cache, the six-core chip, code-named Dunnington, will be built with Intel"s new 45 nanometer (nm) technology, according to Pat Gelsinger, a senior vice president and general manager of Intel"s Digital Enterprise group. "The big cache and six cores will give customers a nice bump in performance," Gelsinger said during a press briefing today to talk about the company"s product roadmap and its upcoming Intel Developer"s Forum slated to be held next month in Shanghai.
This announcement comes after AMD confirmed that it has started shipping its triple-core Phenom processors just last week, and again pushes Intel well-ahead of its chief rival. However, it"s not necessarily a terribly damaging development for AMD. According to Dan Olds, an analyst with the Gabriel Consulting Group, "for AMD, it just means that they"re falling a little bit further behind...a six-core is a big deal, but most desktop software can"t really take advantage of dual-core yet..."