by Jon Stokes for Ars Technica
The new, “Nehalem”-based Xeon processor that Intel detailed at ISSCC today has eight cores, or at least it does most of the time. Intel reps described for conference attendees how the chipmaker takes a broken eight-core part and turns it into a working six-core part.
At an ISSCC session Monday, Intel went into new detail on its forthcoming 8-core, 16-thread Xeon processor, a 64-bit processor that’s a member of the Nehalem family. Much of the session was focused on the packaging and power aspects of the device, so I’ll recap some of the more interesting parts of that here.
The Intel presenter explained that the Xeon has three different clock and voltage domains: the core region, the uncore region, and the I/O region. (You may recall from previous coverage of Nehalem that the “uncore” region of the processor is so named because it’s the area that doesn’t have a processor core in it; this area is mostly cache.)
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