Intel talks about Nehalem, Larrabee, Dunnington

In a conference call from intel yesterday details where revealed on Intels up-coimg Dunnington, the company's upcoming six-core server part; Nehalem, the next-generation architecture that will supplant Core 2 processors later this year; and Larrabee, Intel's forthcoming discrete graphics processor.

Dunnington feature six cores, 16MB of L3 cache, and a staggering 1.9 billion transistors. Dunnington's six cores will all be Core 2-based, and the processor will slip into the same Caneland platform as today's Socket 604, Xeon 7300-series CPUs. Dunnington appears to be a single-die product, unlike Intel's four-core offerings that are just two dual-core dies tacked together on the same package. Shipments are due some time in the second half of the year.

Then Intel chatted about Nehalem which boasts the Core microarchitecture that's at the heart of most Intel CPUs today, and we've known for a while that it will bring several major enhancements, like the addition of an integrated memory controller and the QuickPath point-to-point interconnect (the answer to AMD's HyperTransport). it'll feature a three-channel DDR3 memory controller with support for DDR3 speeds as high as 1333MHz. The triple-channel controller will appear on both desktop and server/workstation offerings, and it will support three memory modules per channel. Using current 2GB DDR3-1333 modules, that means you'd be able to cram 18GB of RAM into a single desktop PC and yield a theoretical maximum of 31.99GB/s of bandwidth