Intel, AMD push envelopes

This quarter, Intel will debut a new multi-processor platform dubbed Caneland that will support 4 quad-core processors for a total of 16 cores, Kirk Skaugen, Intel vice president and General Manager of the Server Products Group announced in a posting to the Intel blog. The new platform will make use of the Tigerton processor, which will top out at 2.93GHz, and the Clarksboro chipset. Both the processor and chipset will go under the Intel 7300 monikier.

Tigerton will officially migrate Intel's server chip line to the Core architecture, which provides power consumption and operating temperature reductions relative to previous dual-core designs. There will be a low voltage 50W version of the chip, designed specifically for densely clustered bladed servers, and a higher-power version operating at a higher frequency. The new chipset could well appear in a future revision of Apple's Mac Pro, which currently uses two 64-bit Quad-Core Intel Xeon Clovertown processors at the top-end.

Meanwhile AMD has announced plans to boost the amount of memory that can be handled by its Opteron platform with a new RAM extender dubbed Socket G3 in 2009. The new extender will support DDR3 DRAM, and increase the number of DIMMs that can be used with each core from eight to 16. Countering AMD's announcement, Intel says it will be the first to offer DDR3 in its Desktop platforms, declining to say when exactly that might be.

by MacNN Staff