Dunnington would be Intel’s first monolithic design since its original Core 2 Duo chips released in 2006. The presentation indicates that Dunnington has six 45-nanometer Penryn-class cores integrated onto a single die. Each pair of Penryn cores shares 3MBs of Level 2 cache, and each of the six cores can access 16MBs of Level 3 cache. That’s a ton of space to store frequently used instructions, which could be a help for the chip in avoiding the front-side bus bottleneck to the main memory that’s still apparently in the works for Dunnington.
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