The Xeon 7400 is also one of the first Intel chips to have a monolithic design. In other words, all six cores will be on one piece of silicon. To date, for any processor having more than two cores, Intel has put two separate pieces of silicon--referred to as die--inside one chip package. Unisys is in the vanguard of server vendors offering systems using the 7400 series processor. On Monday, the Blue Bell, Pa.-based computer vendor announced the ES7000 Model 7600R Enterprise Server, a 16- socket server providing up to 96 processor cores.
AMD has long claimed their monolithic multi-core design has a performance advantage over Intel's dual-chip module design (even though benchmarks suggest otherwise). Now that Intel has a monolithic design I'm curious whether it'll provide the performance AMD promised of its monolithic design.