The Quad-Core Race

There's a classic first-to-market race on (again) between Intel and AMD, and this time it's in the quad-core arena. It's clear Intel's going to win it with the planned introdution of their Core 2 Extreme QX6700 "Kentsfield" and Xeon 5300 "Clovertown" processors next month. By contrast, AMD won't have their quad-core Opteron ready until next year. But it's not that simple.

To get to market quicker, Intel has compromised by using two dual-core chips in a single package, rather than the full four cores in a single chip, prompting some to complain that the Intel processors are less than true quad-core chips. Intel claims, however, that the performace difference between the two approaches will be minimal, and that the 2x2 approach gives customers more flexibility.

This may be the case for now, but the real test will be the scalability of the design. With predictions of processors having tens of cores in the coming years, latency introduced by the interconnects between chips will become more of a factor.

AMD, for its part, is also keeping interest in next year's Opteron high, having recently announced that processor's execution path for multimedia instruction extensions will be 128 bits wide. The Opeteron is looking to be a potential powerhouse now not only for virtualization, but also for demanding media tasks.

I can't wait for the processor shoot-outs once the Opteron hits the market.

Posted by Kevin Carlson at 12:32 PM  Permalink