Intel expects to ship its first processor with four
cores in the early part of next year, boosting PC server
performance.
News of an impending four-core solution comes as Intel expects
to sell about 60 million dual-core chips this year.
The new four-core chip is codenamed Clovertown and bundles four
processors on a single platform.
Such a processor uses less power than single-core designs and
allows machines to process data more quickly and run more
applications at the same time.
Intel said Clovertown would be aimed at servers that run
enterprise networks and host websites. It said the chip would be
sold in servers with sockets for two four-core processors, which
means the servers could have as many as eight cores for processing
data rapidly.
Intel has so far not said whether the four-core chip will be
four processors on a single piece of silicon or whether it will be
two dual-core processors stuck together.
A single silicon wafer solution is more power-efficient but
harder to manufacture.