Both Intel and AMD have unveiled their latest server
chip designs at this week’s International Solid State Circuits
Conference in San Francisco.
Intel has revealed Tulsa, a dual-core Xeon server chip expected
in the second-half of the year.
The chip will run at 3.4GHz, which is faster than the 3GHz Xeon
chip currently on the market. Tulsa comes with a 16Mbytes unified
cache, which means that each of the cores can access data from the
entire cache.
Currently, Intel and AMD dual-core chips use segregated caches,
which can slow processing. Intel said this enhancement can improve
processing on some applications by up to 10%.
AMD’s new Pacifica chip unveiled at the conference is designed
for lower power consumption and comes with AMD's own virtualisation
technology.
Virtualisation allows a chip to efficiently power multiple
operating systems running at the same time.
Pacifica has two 512Kbytes caches – one for each of the cores.
AMD is not expected to have a unified cache until next year.