Intel confirms it will ship eight-core chips this month

CHIPMAKER Intel has told Computerworld that it will release eight-core chips by the end of the month.

The eight-core Nehalem-EX server processors will be targeted at four-socket servers.

Shannon Poulin, Xeon platform director at Intel, said that each core in the chips can run two threads simultaneously, giving a four-socket server 64 virtual processing cores.

Intel's CEO Paul Otellini has said that the Nehalem-EX will be the company's fastest processor to date and although it was announced last year Chipzilla has previously refused to give an exact release date.

Poulin is not saying what the clock speed of the chips will be, only that they will have 24MB of cache and 2.3 billion transistors. The chips are built on the 45nm fab process and are based on the company's Nehalem micro-architecture.

The processors also have machine-check architecture and recovery error correction to make servers more fault-tolerant and provide longer uptime. This means that the processors will be able to detect system errors originating in the CPU or system memory and correct them by working with the operating system. These features were developed decades ago in IBM mainframes and were first seen in Intel's products in its high-end Itanium processors.

Poulin said that Intel will offer four memory channels per processor. This will bring it up to speed with AMD's twelve-core Opteron server processors code-named Magny-Cours, which also offer four memory channels per processor.

However AMD's Magny-Cours chips could still be cheaper than Intel's Nehalem-EX line of processors. It is expected that Intel will charge an arm and a leg for its eight-core chips.

Poulin hinted that Intel might also release its next-generation Xeon server processors based on the Westmere micro-architecture later this month. Apparently the first of these will be targeted at two-socket servers, while Westmere chips for four-socket servers will be released next year. µ