At the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, chief executive Paul Otellini said that the PC chips, code-named Kentfield when they were announced at IDF in March, will ship in November, a few months ahead of schedule.
Kentfield is now the Intel Core2 Extreme QX6700 quad-core processor. Intel reckons the processor, aimed at gamers who demand high performance for graphics, is about 70% faster than its existing two-core Core2 Duo processor.
Another PC-oriented quad-core, aimed at a more mainstream audience, will be called the Intel Core2 Quad. That processor is still due to ship early next year, the original Kentfield timetable.
On the server side, Clovertown, named now the Quad-Core Xeon 5300, will also ship this year for dual-processor boxes, and the related Xeon L5310, a lower-power 50-watt chip designed for blades, will move in the first quarter of 2007.
Much has been written about Intel losing momentum, Otellini said in his speech yesterday morning, following a year or so of press indicating AMD was overtaking Intel in the technological arms race. We have now regained our leadership.
Indeed, Advanced Micro Devices Inc, Intel’s main rival, plans to release its four-core processors some time toward the middle of next year. However, while AMD plans to put four cores on one piece of silicon, Intel’s quad-core processors are actually two intimately integrated dual-cores.
Otellini, during a media and analyst Q&A session following his keynote, testily shrugged off the idea that the packaging is very important to buyers. Performance and power consumption are what matters, he indicated.
Looking further out, Intel chief technology office Justin Rattner demonstrated a selection of prototypes in Intel’s tera-scale development roadmap, including last week’s announced hybrid laser, which will bring optical technology, and terabyte traffic, to silicon for the first time.
Intel’s R&D will also mean a teraflops-capable processor within the next five years, the two men indicated. A teraflops is a trillion floating point operations per second.
This means 80 cores on a processor, Rattner said, showing off a prototype capable of such speeds, albeit using a reduced instruction set not compatible with current computers.
