Clovertown '4-core' will not be as expected?

An analyst warned that Intel's upcoming 4-core Xeon processor family - codenamed Clovertown - will not improve performance as expected.

Clovertown chip is expected to be officially available in the market in early 2007.

Nathan Brookwood - an analyst at Insight64 - said Clovertown chip might just be a chip that is integrated with two other dual-core products, not really a "quad-core" chip.

" Intel has never said that Clovertown chips will be manufactured on a quad-core processor architecture, or simply by combining two dual-core chips in a multi-chip package ," Nathan said.

According to analyst's view, Clovertown chip will use the solution to combine two core of Woodcrest processor or multi-chip package solution. Woodcrest is the codename for Intel's upcoming new dual-core Xeon chips.

Intel has also used this "situation" solution for its first generation of dual-core chip products - combining two cores of two single chips to create "dual-core" chips.

Intel's first "dual-core" chip products, however, have outperformed single-chip models despite using the same system bandwidth. However, a reasonable duplicated architecture will bring even more efficiency.

But to the Woodcrest dual-core chip with the Blackford chipset this problem will be solved when the dual-core chips will have completely independent system bandwidth.

However, this problem is returning to Clovertown's "4-core" chip - the chip line has two Woodcrest cores, each of which has two independent system bandwidths. So Clovertown could only outperform the Woodcrest chip "a bit". Only when Intel has a reasonable 4-core architecture, the speed is completely improved.