Oi! You should have seen the cringe I just made reading that horrid thought. Aren't the Clovertown chips supposed to be on 65nm though? That should cut down the thermals a bit over a 90nm part. Of course, if that takes it from 200w to 150w, they're still screwed. I hope they do it right, or at least decently, as I'd be all over a quad-core chip. How many cores do you think we'll hit by 2010? I wouldn't be too surprised if we're in the 8-16 range. And in theory if all apps are threaded by that point, you really can just multiply clock speeds by number of cores (more or less). Intel should have that "10 GHz" after all!
On the plus side, its not netburst. On the negative side, its still the same tired old 1000 MHz FSB of netbursst (at least in the socket 771 coming out soon). Im with the analyst; the bottleneck as things stand for intel's solution is the FSB; just imagine how resource starved each processor will be with four vying for the limited amount of data transfer as is.
Well, if it's not going to be Netburst, they'll probably do what they did with the Core Duo and have a proper interconnect within the chip rather than relying on the FSB. FSB will still be a limitation for memory comms though, unless they come out with integrated memory controllers and some HyperTransport beater -- entirely feasable as they have a year of development left and could easily have been working on such a system for quite some time. Intel said they are hoping for tens of cores by 2010, firehed. I guess that means something like 16, 24 or 32. ch424
Intel must learn to imitate or copy some ideas from IBM or AMD. if not they will be "in deep f...ig sh.."
Guessing from the article it will be two pair of cores and each pair will have an internal link, but the pairs will talk to eachother and the memory over the FSB. THis is the equivelant of what they did with their first dual core design. It occours to me that as we get further and further into multi-cores the need to balanace the load between cores without excessive overhead is going to become more and more critical.