Intel plans to stuff more than 8 cores, extra speed into 2011 server chips
Yeah yeah, "more cores and faster speeds," you've heard it all before right? That'd be our reaction too if we weren't talking about the successor to the Nehalem-Ex, Intel's most gruesomely overpowered chip to date. Launched under the Xeon 7500 branding in March, it represents Intel's single biggest generational leap so far, and with its eight cores, sixteen threads, and 24MB of shared onboard cache, you could probably see why. Time waits for no CPU though, and Intel's planned 32nm Westmere-Ex successor will move things forward with an unspecified increase in both core count (speculated to be jumping up to 12) and operating frequencies, while keeping within the same power envelope. Given the current 2.26GHz default speed and 2.66GHz Turbo Boost option of the 7500, that means we're probably looking at a 2.4GHz to 2.5GHz 12-core, hyper-threaded processor, scheduled to land at some point next year. Time to make some apps that can use all that parallel processing power, nay?
