Intel today officially revealed its multi-core processor roadmap. On top of the heap is the six-core "Dunnington" processor based on 45nm high-k fabrication technology, and with large shared caches. This chip is specially designed for server applications and will be available in the second half of 2008. The Tukwila is Intel's next-generation Itanium processor with four cores, 30MB total cache, QuickPath Interconnect, dual Integrated Memory Controller and mainframe-class RAS features. It is the world's first 2 billion transistor microprocessor and is projected to deliver more than double the performance of the current generation Itanium processor.

Nehalem is Intel's dynamically scalable and innovative new processor microarchitecture, scalable with future versions having anywhere from 2 to 8 cores, with Simultaneous Multi-threading, resulting in 4 to 16 thread capability. Nehalem will deliver 4 times the memory bandwidth compared to today's highest-performance Intel Xeon processor-based systems. With up to 8 MB level-3 cache, 731 million transistors, Quickpath interconnects (up to 25.6GB per second), integrated memory controller and optional integrated graphics, Nehalem will eventually scale from notebooks to high-performance servers. Other features discussed include support for DDR3-800, 1066, and 1333 memory, SSE4.2 instructions, 32KB instruction cache, 32KB Data Cache, 256K L2 data and instruction low-latency cache per core and new 2-level TLB (Translation Lookaside Buffer) hierarchy. These technical improvements will result in performance improvements as well as flexibility for a wide range of eventual products based on the Nehalem architecture.