Intel Harpertown is the coming processor that will bring Intel’s server segment into the 45nm era. Harpertown is a quad-core processor that has been optimized for single and dual-socket systems and at a first glance one might even mistake it for the desktop sibling Yorkfield as they share many superficial specifications, e.g. 1333MHz FSB. Harpertown has been designed to work together with Intel’s server/workstation chipsets Intel 5000/5100, but what we find really intriguing is that Intel will reintroduce DDR2 support with its “low-end” servers. X-bit labs has come across some more information about the coming processor, while we’ve also found out that Intel will most likely have (at least) one Harpertown system up and running during Computex.
“The major micro-architectural improvements for new Intel Core 2 processors, besides SSE4 instruction set, include the so-called Unique Super Shuffle Engine and Radix 16 technique. The Super Shuffle Engine is a full-width, single-pass shuffle unit that is 128-bits wide, which can perform full-width shuffles in a single cycle. This significantly improves performance for SSE2, SSE3 and SSE4 instructions that have shuffle-like operations such as pack, unpack and wider packed shifts.
This feature will increase performance for content creation, imaging, video and high-performance computing. Radix 16 technique, according to Intel, roughly doubles the divider speed over previous generations for computations used in nearly all applications. In addition, Intel also improved virtualization technology as well as added some features to dynamic acceleration technology, which is supposed to boost single-threaded applications’ performance on multi-core chips.”
