Comments on: Intel unveils 6-core chip, as Unisys touts 96 cores

The six-core "Dunnington" Xeon 7400 processor makes its official debut. Unisys is using it in a new server, though with a catch.

[Renegade Knight]

Why don't they just make single cores but have motherboards where you can upgrade your CPU by adding cores? Then a core would be a consumer upgrade like buying RAM.

[atici]

That means one core per cpu as it has been in the past. The reason is it's cheaper to print multiple cores than produce multiple chips. Having multiple cores is also faster than having multiple chips. It's also easier to cool and manage.

[jon_cnet]

RE: Renegade Knight

Well, it sounds like you do not have much background in processors. There are many reasons that your proposed "idea" would not work. Just to name a few below:
1. The management of real estate on the motherboard. You would force someone to purchase a motherboard with, for example, 32 sockets on the board, but what if this person only wanted to have 16 processors and will never fill up 32? You could say, well, he/she can just buy the 16 socket motherboard. Well, how many different versions of motherboards would you offer? The motherboard manufacturer would have to design and test each single version, which would not be very cost effective.
2. By separating each "core" into separate packages, which was done before, limits the maximum speed a that the cores can operate at. Each core would have to run through traces (or wires) on the motherboard to a memory controller that handles the memory transactions. The speed at which information travels on these traces are limited by physics and the longer they are, the less reliable they are at higher speeds. However, by putting these cores on the same silicon, their traces are much shorter and are more reliable and allow for much higher operating frequencies.
These are only a couple of examples, but there are more such as power consumption and heat.