System Diary Technology News Blog

Little more than a month remains before the announcement of the CPU Core i7-980X Extreme Edition with six cores and a nominal frequency of 3.33 GHz. It is quite logical that Intel has decided to talk about the architectural features of processors Gulftown during the conference at which representatives of the visited sites AnandTech and Tech Report.

We must start with a description of innovation inherent in processors Gulftown. Like all the processors generation Westmere, they support hardware acceleration encryption algorithm AES. In addition, energy saving technology is now gone much further: Processors Gulftown can disable not only the nucleus, but also other functional blocks such as memory controller, QPI bus controller and cache the third level. If you turn off the last critical information is stored in specially provided for this memory type SRAM. The memory controller processor Gulftown not only supports DDR-3 modules with a rated voltage of 1.5 V, and modules with a rated voltage of 1.35 V.

Processor Gulftown contains 1.17 billion transistors on a monolithic chip area of 240 sq. mm He has six cores and 12 MB cache in the third level. More modest in their performance 45 nm processors Bloomfield and Lynnfield have crystal area 263 and 296 sq. mm, respectively, satisfied with four cores. The number of transistors does not exceed 731 million units for Bloomfield and 774 million units for Lynnfield. This clearly illustrates the advantages of 32-nm technology, for which generations of processors will be produced Westmere.

By the way, the mysterious CPU Core i7-970 (3.2 GHz), our foreign colleagues believe quad “younger brother” Gulftown. The basis is formed by six-core crystal, but only four remain active nucleus. The possibility of such a transformation implicitly hinting itself from Intel. To release a “purely quad-core processors in the family Westmere she does not want to, preferring to wait for the transition to the architecture of Sandy Bridge.

Site Tech Report tells about some interesting developments of Intel. In particular, the company managed to create a prototype 47-channel interface in the form of a flexible bridge, allowing the transfer of information between processors at speeds of 470 Gbps. The level of energy consumption of the interface does not exceed 0.7 Tues The interface can be used in multiprocessor systems.

Multi-core future, according to Intel, can have independent frequency and voltage for each core, the need to adjust to the weakest core will disappear. Faster core will be stronger than the work load. If the high frequency and voltage will cause malfunction, the kernel will perform the task repeatedly, if necessary – at a lower frequency.

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