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Intel's next bunch of fun CPUs moves to 2010

Highway to Gulftown and Beckton opens in a year
Thursday, 12 February 2009, 16:27

REPORTS on Intel's Westmere 32nm plans contain one slightly disappointing piece of news. The six-core 12 MB cache Gulftown – the 32 nm successor to the current Core i7 high-end LGA1366 Nehalems – is now firmly a 1H 2010 entry, rather than the intro part for the 32 nm process. And that's from the mouth of our friend Stephen Smith, our favourite Veep at the Digital Enterprise Group. By extension, that would apply to its dual-socket equivalent that follows the soon-to-be-out Gainestown Nehalem EP.

Another point, just confirmed today, is that the 45nm 8-core biggie, the 'Beckton' Nehalem EX – critical to Intel's recapture of the 4-8 socket enterprise and HPC performance lead – is seemingly also a 1Q 2010 part. We really hoped that this part, expected to roll over its competition (both X86 and otherwise) would be out this calendar year, but looks like it's not to be.

Will the delay have any impact? If AMD doesn't suffer a premature death due to a possible Arab funding failure, it should have more than just a DDR3, HT3-enabled smoother-scaling flavour of Shanghai. Those six-corers like Istanbul, and even a 12-core MCM version – provided the socket is big enough – are possible, too.

If any of these come out at a time close to the first quarter of 2010, it will pose some competition to Beckton. How much? Depends on what AMD can deliver performance-wise.

Whatever the monster multi processor update is from AMD then, it won't (or shouldn't) run at less than 2.8GHz clock-wise. Meaning that Intel may have to go above 2.66 GHz for the Beckton launch if it does happen in early 2010.

As for the UP and DP, with an updated stepping past the most recent D0, Intel should be able to ratchet up the Gainestown on DP and Bloomfield on UP to 3.6 GHz by year end. It should keep it well ahead even of DDR3-enabled Shanghai, at least unless AMD decides to release the six-corer in UP and DP package before the Gulftown cometh.

In summary, the 2010 (re)schedule of Gulftown and Beckton doesn't impact the Intel performance position in any meaningful way, but it does give AMD an opening to grab a head start, at least in the MP market, where its Shanghai MP Opterons do keep ahead of FSB'd Dunningtons in HPC stuff as of now.

The DP and UP segments remain led by Intel, unless AMD pulls a naughty speed surprise out of the bag in the meantime. µ

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Comments
Dude! Dude!

well, I think You, Mister my friend Nova takes a litte bit to lightly the break through required to do 32nm High K ...

Just to remind everybody ... it is possible to put several hundreds transistors with their interconnect into a Red blood Cell diagonal, The process technlogy people are designing and making parts that are smaller than the smallest Cell design by mother Nature ... How can you see any dissapointement into this?
Being able to say that you will produce this at the Human Kind scale is just purely amazing ...

Francois Piednoel

posted by : Francois, 12 February 2009 Complain about this comment
Drashek has a new friend?

Oh dear - looks like we have a new comment bot on the loose. Is Francois a new bot-pal of Drashek?

posted by : Not-a-bot, 12 February 2009 Complain about this comment
Nehalem EP ?

What does the 32nm delays got to do with the 45nm Nehalem Xeon that hasn't even been released?

posted by : Bogdan, 12 February 2009 Complain about this comment
AMD

AMD must release a 6 or 8 core CPU before Intel or that is it. I find that the first to release usually decideds the winner unless its as faulty as hell like the Nvidia moble gpus in which my HP has. Take the lesser 360 console, it got out of the gates first and had all kinds of hardware issues RROD, but becuase of M$ return and repair process it as remained the king and knocked sony on their ass even though sonys ps3 should be more powerfull. AMD must get out a six or eight core, thats it!

posted by : Dorman. T Reign, 12 February 2009 Complain about this comment
Introducing Nvidia Cell Processor

coming near you in 2010.

posted by : cvxvx, 12 February 2009 Complain about this comment
2.66?

6+ core 2.66 Ghz? Bleh. Can I just have a 5 Ghz dual core at stock speed, please?

posted by : Mike Green, 13 February 2009 Complain about this comment
GERMAN Process Enters INTEL....

Since Intel will do its best to continue its tick-tock strategy to bring a brand new core every odd year and a smaller, yet derived one every even year, with this in mind you can expect P1270 process and 22nm products in 2011. Intel has already revealed this plan publicly and plans to stick with it.
Since this is not enough and Intel wants to keep winning, it plans to introduce P1272 and 16nm CPUs in 2013 and probably 11nm in 2015 and so on. One thing is certain, Intels roadmap and execution in the last few years has been delivered with deadly efficiency.gulftown:
top models of the Westmere program is code-named Gulftown and has no less than 6 physical cores, which through HyperThreading adds up to 12 virtual cores. To make room for all these cores, Intel has kicked out the integrated graphics, which doesnt fit into the high-end segment anyway. Gulftown looks to arrive at the start of 2010 while the mid-range, after. sO rEMEBER nAME: gULFTOWN. All While AMD hopes to Pop Up to 30% of ALL Mainboards Sales. Some of Them described here:According to AMDs latest plans, you can expect a new IGP chipset with AM3 support in very early Q3 2009. The new chipset is codenamed RS880 and it will be matched with SB710 Southbridge.
This chipset should replace AMD 780G with SB700 chipset while AMD 790GX will get a replacement at some point in Q4, called RS880D. The new chipset will feature improved performance of its DirectX 10.1 integrated graphics, additional power saving and enhanced Avivo HD technology.
The SB710 comes with 6 SATA 3Gb/sec ports, Raid 0,1 and 10, advanced clock calibration and 12+2 USB ports & another, due in 365 days:
the company will release SB820 . The new SB820 Southbridge will bring Gigabit MAC inside as well as SATA 3 with double the bandwidth, where you can expect a whopping 6Gb/sec per controller. This is one of the unique features of SB8x0 chipsets and SB850 will also share this neat feature.
Both Major Players Seem to be Striding Right to Cash Cow, Yet INTEL Seems to have Two Step that Could Blast consumer Desktop Beyond.Also, By Turning writings into one big paragraph Slur, Ultee' Hopes to Take Over Known World by 2013, Say Christmas. Or to keep guessing Which One will be theONE, New Years. TS Drashek

posted by : Ultee'_Micro, 13 February 2009 Complain about this comment
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