Kentsfield (microprocessor)

Kentsfield is the code name of the first Intel desktop Core 2 Quad and quad-core Xeon CPUs, released on November 2, 2006. The top-of-the-line Kentsfields were Core 2 Extreme models numbered QX6x00, while the mainstream Core 2 Quad models were numbered Q6x00. All of them featured two 4 MiB L2 caches. The mainstream 65 nanometer Core 2 Quad Q6600, clocked at 2.4 GHz, was launched on January 8, 2007 at US$851 (reduced to US$530 on April 7, 2007). July 22, 2007 marked the release of the Core 2 Quad Q6700 and Core 2 Extreme QX6850 Kentsfields at US$530 and US$999 respectively; the price of the Q6600 was later reduced to US$266. Both Kentsfield and Kentsfield XE use product code 80562. Analogous to the Pentium D branded CPUs, the Kentsfields comprise two separate silicon dies (each equivalent to a single Core 2 Duo) on one MCM. This results in lower costs, but a lesser share of the bandwidth from each of the CPUs to the northbridge than if the dies were each to sit in separate sockets as is the case for the AMD Quad FX platform. As might be predicted from the two-die MCM configuration, the thermal design power of the Kentsfield (QX6800 - 130 watts, QX6700 - 130 W, Q6600 - 105 W ) is double that of its similarly clocked Core 2 Duo counterpart. The multiple cores of the Kentsfield mostly benefits applications that can easily be broken into a small number of parallel threads (such as audio and video transcoding, data compression, video editing, 3D rendering and ray-tracing). To take a specific example, multi-threaded games such as Crysis and Gears of War which must perform multiple simultaneous tasks such as AI, audio and physics benefit from quad-core CPUs. In such cases, the processing performance may increase relative to that of a single-CPU system by a factor approaching the number of CPUs. This should, however, be considered an upper limit as it assumes that the user-level software is properly threaded. To return to the above example, some tests have demonstrated that Crysis fails to take advantage of more than two cores at any given time.