An analyst has warned that Intel’s upcoming 4-core Xeon processors for servers, codenamed Clovertown, will not deliver the expected performance improvements.
The Clovertown chip is expected to officially hit the market in early 2007.
Nathan Brookwood, an analyst at Insight64, believes that the Clovertown chip may simply be an integration of two existing dual-core products rather than a true “4-core” chip.
“Intel has not indicated whether the Clovertown chip will be based on a true 4-core architecture or if it is merely combining two dual-core chips in a multi-chip package,” Nathan stated.
In the analyst’s view, the Clovertown chip will utilize a solution that combines two cores from the Woodcrest processor or a multi-chip package. Woodcrest is the codename for Intel’s upcoming dual-core Xeon chip line.
Previously, Intel used this “interim” solution for its first-generation dual-core chips, which involved combining the cores of two single chips to create “dual-core” chips.
Despite this, Intel’s first “dual-core” chips demonstrated superior performance compared to single-core chips, even when sharing the same system bandwidth. However, a properly designed dual-core architecture would still yield even greater efficiency.
With the introduction of the Woodcrest dual-core generation along with the Blackford chipset, this issue would be addressed as the cores of these dual-chip processors would have completely independent system bandwidths.
Nevertheless, this issue has resurfaced with the Clovertown “4-core” chips—each consisting of two Woodcrest cores, with each core having its own independent system bandwidth. As a result, the Clovertown chip may only be marginally faster than the Woodcrest chip. True performance enhancements will only be realized when Intel achieves a well-designed 4-core architecture.
