Late last month in Austria, Intel presented Sun with roadmaps discussing details of its upcoming server platforms, including the fairly secret Xeon Dunnington and Nehalem architectures. Unfortunately for some, this presentation ended up on Sun"s public web server over the weekend.
Dunnington, Intel"s 45nm six-core Xeon processor from the Penryn family, will succeed the Xeon Tigerton processor. Whereas Tigerton is essentially two 65nm Core 2 Duo processors fused on one package, Dunnington will be Intel"s first Core 2 Duo processor with three dual-core banks. Dunnington includes 16MB of L3 cache shared by all six processors. Each pair of cores can also access 3MB of local L2 cache. The end result is a design very similar to the AMD Barcelona quad-core processor; however, each Barcelona core contains 512KB L2 cache, whereas Dunnington cores share L2 cache in pairs.
To sweeten the deal, all Dunnington processors will be pin-compatible with Intel Tigerton processors, and work with the existing Clarksboro chipset. Intel"s slide claims this processor will launch in the second half of 2008 -- a figure consistent with previous roadmaps from the company.