Yesterday's entry on Intel's Research@Intel blog by the company's Microprocessor Technology Lab Principal Engineer, Anwar Ghuloum, suggests the chipmaker will eventually offer chips with cores that count in the thousands, and tens and hundreds before that. In the blog, Ghuloum writes about working with external developers to take advantage of multi-core and terascale chips his company is developing.
AMD on Monday announced it will be adding Business Class platforms to its line-up of multi-core CPUs. The maker's dual-core Athlon and triple or quad-core Phenom CPUs, coupled with AMD 780V chipset and optional ATI Radeon integrated graphics support are featured in the Business Class. The benefits of the new platforms will include up to 24-month image stability when installed in first-issue desktops, and a minimum 12 months in subsequent models. Furthermore, all are energy efficient thanks to Energy Star 4.0 rating.
AMD engineers this week said that the company plans on introducing new 12-core processors later this year. The first processors based on 45nm Shanghai platform are due later this year and will be nearly identical to the B3 variant of the Socket 1207 Opteron (Barcelona) shipping today, according to DailyTech. The processors will reportedly use the faster HyperTransport 3.0 for inter-CPU communication and will debut later this year as a "native six-core" Shanghai derivative, currently code-named Istanbul. That processor, the report claims, is "clearly targeted at Intel's recently announced six-core, 45nm Dunnington processor." A few months later, Shanghai and its derivatives will also get twin-die per package treatment, allowing for up to 12-cores per package, the report says.
