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Follow us on FacebookIntel touts 8-core Xeon monster Nehalem-EX
@ 2009/05/28Wednesday Intel took the wraps off the next iteration of its Xeon server line, the Nehalem EX, which will debut in the second half of this year. Nehalem EX has up to 8 cores, which gives a total of 16 threads per socket (with hyperthreading). That's a lot of threads in one socket, so it's good that Intel outfitted the chip with plenty of I/O and memory bandwidth in the form of four QPI links and two integrated memory controllers. Also helping to keep the cores fed is a 24MB cache.
The whole thing weighs in at 2.3 billion transistors, which is even larger than the record-breaking 2 billion-transistor "Tukwila" Itanium that Intel unveiled in February of last year. At the time, the quad-core Tukwila was Intel's largest processor, and the fact that an x86 part has caught up with it in size and will launch ahead of it (Tukwila is delayed yet again) says something about where Xeon is headed.
The whole thing weighs in at 2.3 billion transistors, which is even larger than the record-breaking 2 billion-transistor "Tukwila" Itanium that Intel unveiled in February of last year. At the time, the quad-core Tukwila was Intel's largest processor, and the fact that an x86 part has caught up with it in size and will launch ahead of it (Tukwila is delayed yet again) says something about where Xeon is headed.
