Intel's 15 Core Processor Is Codenamed 'Ivytown', Features Revealed

Reports from the ISSCC (International Solid-State Circuits Conference) organised by IEEE at San Fransisco, California, which concluded on February 13, state that Intel is preparing to launch a 15 core CPU. This new processor will be in line of its Xeon E7 series. The chip codenamed Ivytown will contain about 4.31 billion transistors. The Xeon range is targeted at servers and workstations and competes against AMD's Opteron range. This move puts them closer to AMD who had 16 cores on their Opteron 6300 chips.

The Ivytown is likely to be the fastest in Intel's x86 architecture chips. Ivytown is based on the Ivy Bridge microarchitecture, which was introduced in 2013. These chips will replace the Xeon E7 chips. These were introduced last year and were based on the Sandy Bridge architecture. The core count value of 15 is unusual; since most chips have 8, 12 or 16 cores. Nevertheless, the 15 cores will be placed in three columns of five each and has 40 PCI-Express 3.0 lanes.

The number of cores in the processors have increased so substantially because the manufacturers have abandoned the practice of increasing the clock speeds which increased the power consumption of CPU. This 15 core processor will draw power between ranges 40 Watts to 150 Watts and will run on a frequency range from 1.4 GHz to 3.8 GHz. Quite obviously, the cores will support multithreading, with each chip running 30 threads simultaneously.

These chips will be made to handle highly sophisticated computing tasks such as databases and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), the same tasks Xeon E7 chips did earlier.

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