Date:
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Author:
Paul Jastrzebski
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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Intel Developer Forum Fall 2006 - Day One

The Intel Developer Forum is well underway and as expected, Intel has made new announcements related to their soon to be released quad-core Kentsfield chip, 45nm wafer production, and even showed off an 80-core wafer prototype.

Otellini Keynote

The big story at this Fall’s Intel Developer Forum is Intel’s future implementation of Quad Core CPU Architecture. In his keynote speech, Paul Otellini the CEO of Intel, announced that Intel will be the first company to market with a quad-core CPU, codenamed Kentsfield, in November.

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In his speech, Otellini announced that Kentsfield’s implementation will be similar to that of Smithfield last May, with the quad-core chip first coming into the high-end enthusiast segment through the Extreme Edition line. More specifically, the quad-core Kentsfield chip that will be released sometime in November will be called the Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700, with the Core 2 Quad series of mainstream desktop chips to coming to market sometime in Q1 of 2007.

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To showcase the new Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700, Otellini brought on stage Markus Macci, the founder and chairman of Remedy, makers of the Max Payne series and the new “mystery – thriller” Alan Wake PC game. Macci was using a Falcon Northwest system running the QX6700 at 3.73GHz, an overclock he noted was around 1GHz higher than the stock speed of the QX6700. Although we haven’t had a chance to test the Kentsfield core first hand yet, the mere fact that Intel was showing off their still unreleased enthusiast class CPU overclocked almost 40% likely signifies great overclocking potential for the many derivatives of the Kentsfield core, not to mention getting the inner-overclocker in all of us very excited. (You can check our forum thread dedicated to Core 2 Duo overclocking here.)

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Otellini also talked about Intel’s dedication to 45nm manufacturing over the next few years. He noted that Intel’s Fab D1D in Oregon is already producing 45nm test wafers and that it will ramp up full scale 45nm wafer production in the second half of 2007. Otellini also showed footage of two 45nm fabs currently being built, Fab-32 in Arizona, and Fab 28, in Israel. The total combined cost of these three facilities will be somewhere in the 9 Billion dollar range, with the three fabs adding up to half a million square feet of clean room among them.

This 9 billion dollar commitment to the 45nm manufacturing process is already evident in Intel’s upcoming CPU cores, 15 of which are already in development for release starting in 2H’ 07.

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In true IDF fashion, Otellini next presented the techie IDF audience with a technology they’ll be dreaming about for the next few years. Otellini showed a prototype wafer that would be used in production of 80-core microprocessors. That’s not a typo, Intel says that just about five years from now, the company expects to start producing 80-core microprocessors on a yet undisclosed die process. Each CPU will have 80 simple floating-point dies that are capable of at least a teraflop of performance a piece, which will allow for enormously bandwidth intensive applications such as real time language translation.