Usually I don’t talk a lot about upcoming CPU’s, other than the odd bit of news about Quad core Laptop chips coming, but this news via Engadget made me very happy, and a little sad too… Intel will be releasing a 6 core processor this year [press release], with 8 core processors on there way….

Not only that, but Hyper Threading is back, now with a new name of SMT, or Simultaneous Multithreading. So, on your 8 Core Xeon processor, you would have 16 threads running at one time, which means that, in theory, on a dual proc octo core machine, you would have 32 threads running. Does Windows see each of the SMT threads as a processor, the same as it did with HT enabled machines?

Anyway, the reason it made me sad is now a single one of these processors is faster than my Dual proc, Dual Core Xeon Mac Pro… Might be time to upgrade soon after these come out… :)

PS: one interesting thing from reading the press release: the Nehalem processor will have up to 8mb Level 3 cache, 731 Million Transistors and up to 25.8GB/S quick path interconnects… 731MILLION TRANSISTORS! that’s nearly 3/4 of a BILLION transistors! Man, that’s a lot!