According to the chaps at the Eclipse Developer's Journal, Intel is planning a six-core microprocessor, which will go by the Dunnington moniker. The six-core beast will be succeeded by the even meatier, Nehalem micro-architecture, which will support greater than eight cores. The work regarding the Dunnington project is still under wraps, but the chaps at EDJ insist Intel has already put together a die, the size of a postage stamp, with three dual-core 45nm Penryn chips on it sharing a 16MB L3 cache. Dunnington doesn't require the record two billion transistors that it takes to make Intel's next-generation 65nm quad-core Tukwila Itanium, but it's reportedly close. Dunnington will appear in a variety of SKUs and a variety of clock rates with power dissipation that ranges beyond 120W. Allegedly, we'll see the Dunnington in either Q2 or Q3, this year - I'll be sure to keep you posted on any developments!