Technology Feast

No sooner had I posted a story on upcoming six-core processors than Intel held a press conference to discuss its Westmere six-core processor–among other products–in more detail. The purpose of the briefing was to preview the papers that Intel will present at a major semiconductor conference, known as ISSCC 2010, which takes place next week in San Francisco.

Here are some additional details on the six-core chip that Intel has confirmed:

The six-core version of Westmere will be available in both desktop (Gulftown) and dual-socket server versions. Not surprisingly, it shares a lot of the same features with the dual-core Core i3 and Core i5 Westmeres including Hyper-Threading (12 threads for a six-core chip), Turbo Boost for improved performance on tasks that are not multi-threaded, an integrated memory controller, and features designed to make it more power-efficient.

But there are some differences too. Gulftown does not have a graphics controller in the same package, which makes sense given that it is designed for enthusiast desktops and will be paired with discrete graphics. It also has a larger data cache–a total of 12MB of L3 compared with 4MB on the dual-core versions–which when combined with the extra cores results in a chip that is larger and contains 1.17 billion transistors. Intel said it uses some of those extra transistors to speed up tasks such as data encryption and decryption.