Planet Lowyat

Intel is set to release its first six-core processor within the next fortnight.

Codenamed Dunnington, it will include all six cores on the same piece of silicon. That’s in contrast to Intel’s quad-core processors, which are split across two separate dies.

The Xeon 7400 Series, to give Dunnington its official title, will sport 16MB of shared level 3 cache and will be backwards compatible with the Xeon 7300 socket.

Intel is pitching the Xeon 7400 as the “virtualisation platform of choice”. It’s expected to give Intel the performance edge over AMD’s “Barcelona” Opteron processors, which have four cores on the same die.

Dunnington will be the last of the Penryn design processors, before the company moves to its Nehalem architecture later this year, which will adopt the company’s new Core i7 branding.