Following Sun Microsystems' virtualisation announcement this morning, I sat down with Nathan Brookwood, analyst at Insight64, to talk about Intel's 6-cores server processor dubbed Dunnington that the chip maker will announce next Monday in San Francisco.

Impressive performance chip... great mid-life kicker if you're already on Caneland. Otherwise you'd better off waiting for Nehalem in 2H09

"Dunnington is the first time Intel has done a multi-core chip that has all of the cores united as opposed to do a multi-chip kind of packages [what Intel did so far]... very nice mid-life kicker for enterprises that have already moved to Caneland [Intel's current multi-processor platform that will be compatible with Dunnington]. But if they didn't move yet to Caneland, then they might wait for the 8-core Nehalem [expected in 2H09]", Brookwood said.

On the roadmap side, and inspite closing the performance gap with Intel, AMD will still lag until about 2010-2011, forecasts Brookwood.

"AMD closed the performance gap this year with Intel but I don't expect AMD to be ahead anytime for the near future. AMD wants to stay in the game. They want to be predictable. But they don't have anything on the map right now that is going to give them the kind of advantage over Intel that they had back in 2003.

It won't be before 2010-11 when AMD makes its major architectural push with the Bulddozzer core when they will have an opportunity to leapfrog Intel. In the meantime Intel will have done several enhancements of their architecture with Nehalem [45nm], SandyBridge [32nm] ...", added Brookwood.

Brookwood also thinks that Intel is being cautious in rolling-out Nehalem, starting with a uniprocessor part later this year and finishing with the 8-cores part in the second half of next year.

2009 Server War: Intel 8-cores vs AMD 6-cores

So next year, we'll see an uneven battle in the server chip competition world happening in front of our eyes. On one side, there will be Intel with an 8-cores Nehalem and on the other, AMD with its 6-cores Shanghai chip.

"Maybe this is one of the reasons why companies like Dreamworks who have been working with AMD for the last 4 years announced earlier this year that they're planning to go to Intel when Nehalem part chip arrives", Brookwood says.

Here's the video of our conversation with Nathan Brookwood: