A Look Inside Intel's Dual Core Technology

The most interesting thing about Intel's dual core tecnology is how it is manufactured. With the tecnology available today for manufacturing processors, called 90 nm, the silicon chips for dual core CPUs must be "together", i.e. side-by-side and cut together from the wafer. You can see this on the left side of Figure 4. This is the tecnology that the announced processors use.

With the future 65 nm technology it is possible to manufacture each silicon chip separately and then put them together, i.e. it will be possible to pick each silicon chip from different positions of the wafer, not requiring them to be originally together. This is what you see on the right side of Figure 4. This manufacturing process is more efficient and will be available on first half of 2006, using a 2 MB memory cache of each core.

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Figure 4: A look inside Intel's dual core technology.

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