Intel is preparing six-core chips for high-end desktops and servers for release in the first half of this year, reports “Computerworld” (http://www.computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/technology/six-core-chips-on-intels-roadmap). I’d expect these babies to appear in upcoming Mac Pros.
The six-core chips will be based on the company’s latest Westmere architecture and deliver faster performance and more power savings compared to earlier quad-core chips. The chips will contain 1.17 billion transistors and include 12MB of cache, a company spokesman says.
The new chips are made using the 32-nanometer process, which is also used to make the company’s latest Core processors introduced last month. The base architecture of both the chips are the same, but the six-core chips won’t include integrated graphics capabilities. Users will need to buy a discrete graphics card to work with the chips, says “Computerworld.”