08/03, 11:30am
Intel Westmere Spotted
Intel's six-core Xeon processor, known as Westmere, has been seen in a leak of an engineering sample today [caution: may not be safe for work). Still identified as a mainstream Core i7 chip by software, the Xeon W5590 example runs at a relatively low 2.4GHz clock speed but has 12MB of Level 3 cache shared between all cores and 256KB of Level 2 cache for each core. With Hyperthreading, which runs up to two program threads on a single core, the system shows as many as 12 effective cores.
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02/10, 3:15pm
Intel Westmere Details
Intel at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference today provided some of the first concrete details of Westmere, the codename for its 32 nanometer processor family. The design is primarily a smaller, more efficient adaptation of the Nehalem architecture in the Core i7 but, in the dual-core desktop (Clarkdale) and notebook (Arrandale) offerings, will include both a two-channel DDR3 memory interface and an integrated but switchable graphics core. Like NVIDIA's Hybrid SLI mode or AMD's Hybrid CrossFire, the technology will let systems with dedicated graphics chipsets revert to Intel's own core in low-demand situations or when on battery.
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