Intel detailed today plans for its chip business. The announced roadmap includes the launch of a six-core processor in the second half of this year, Dunnington, that of Nehalem, Intel's code name for its next entirely new chip design, in the fourth quarter and, more interestingly, that of a new generation of powerful multipurpose graphics chips next year.

Dunnington is the code name for the next server chip line, due to replace Xeons with up to six cores. It offers compatibility with systems designed for quad-core Xeon processors. "The big cache and six cores will give customers a nice bump in performance," said Pat Gelsinger, a senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise group, to the press. Dunnington will feature 1.9 billion transistors and 16MB of L3 cache.

The Nehalem, due to enter production over the fourth quarter, will include an integrated memory controller, eliminating the need for a front-side bus. This feature was highlighted by Gelsinger as the most important innovation embedded in the new chip design. AMD has been using it since 2003. Nehalem will offer from two to eight cores.

The most interesting announcement is related to a multipurpose graphics processor scheduled for 2009 or 2010. Gelsinger said the new chip will come with a brand-new set of vector-processing instructions as part of its design, but will still feature x86 compatibility.

"Attempts to create new programmable architectures are painful heavy-lifting over time, and for the most part they fail," said Gelsinger, recalling the Itanium experience. He claims that its software development tools will take the platform above products from competitors Nvidia and Advanced Micro Device's ATI unit. The new chip will be able to handle both graphics and other math tasks such as video compression.

Recently, Intel announced the official name of its new family of low-power processor that were conceived especially for MIDs (mobile Internet devices) and a new class of Internet-centric computers. Previously known as Silverthorne and Diamondville, these new chips will be officially called Intel Atom. The Intel Atom processor is not just a modified version of an existing processor. It is based on an entirely new microarchitecture designed specifically for small devices and low power, while maintaining the Intel Core 2 Duo instruction set compatibility.