Intel Corp., the world’s largest chipmaker, showcased at its developer forum in Taipei, Taiwan its forthcoming quad-core processor for servers. Public demonstration of the server chip that is expected to be launched in less than a year should emphasize readiness of the design.

The prototype of the code-named Clovertown server processor utilizes two physical dice on a substrate, each of the units sport two processing engines and 4MB of unified cache, thus providing four executing cores and 8MB of cache in total. Intel Corp. has already demonstrated the new product in an attempt to show off its technological excellence. However, the company did not reveal any peculiarities of the Clovertown’s design earlier.

The sample of the quad-core server chip Intel demonstrated at IDF Taipei worked at 2.0GHz, reported HKEPC web-site, whereas dual-core server processors code-named Woodcrest, which are due to be out in a few months from now, will be able to operate at up to 3.33GHz, significantly higher speed bin compared to the current quad-core prototype.

According to Cinebench 9.5 benchmark results obtained by Intel Corp., the Clovertown chip with four processing engines scores 1723, whereas the same chip that has only one core enabled hits 362. Cinebench is a free benchmarking tool for Windows and Mac OS based on the powerful 3D software Cinema 4D. The benchmark includes render tasks that test the performance of up to 16 processors on the same computer as well as software-only shading tests and OpenGL shading tests on huge numbers of animated polygons that are claimed to push any computer to its limits.

Intel’s code-named Clovertown chip is the company’s first microprocessor to feature four execution engines, or cores. The chip is designed for dual-socket servers and it is known that it is produced using 65nm process technology. Intel is also working on Tigerton, quad-core processor for multi-processor servers. Additionally, the company is designing quad-core chips for desktops and notebooks.