Intel has officially unveiled its multi-core processor roadmap, which includes code-name Intel Nehalem, Intel Tukwila, and Intel Dunnington. Nehalem is Intel’s dynamically scalable and innovative new processor microarchitecture, which scalable with future versions having 2 to 8 cores, features with Simultaneous Multi-threading, resulting in 4 to 16 thread capability. With up to 8 MB level-3 cache, 731 million transistors, Quickpath interconnects (up to 25.6GB per second), integrated memory controller and optional integrated graphics, which will deliver 4 times the memory bandwidth compared to today’s highest-performance Intel Xeon processor-based systems. Other features include support for DDR3-800, 1066, and 1333 memory, SSE4.2 instructions, 32KB instruction cache, 32KB Data Cache, 256K L2 data and instruction low-latency cache per core and new 2-level TLB (Translation Lookaside Buffer) hierarchy. These technical improvements will result in performance improvements as well as flexibility for a wide range of eventual products based on the Nehalem architecture. Nehalem will eventually scale from notebooks to high-performance servers.

The Tukwila is Intel’s next-generation Itanium processor with four cores, 30MB total cache, QuickPath Interconnect, dual Integrated Memory Controller and mainframe-class RAS features. It is the world’s first 2 billion transistor microprocessor and is projected to deliver more than double the performance of the current generation Itanium processor. While Dunnington is the six-core processor based on 45nm high-k fabrication technology, comes with large share caches. This chip is specially designed for server applications and will be available in the second half of 2008.

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