Intel, AMD Jockey For Multicore Mindshare

The semiconductor giant may have been trying to get a jump on an AMD announcement scheduled for next week at the LinuxWorld conference in Boston. There, AMD is expected to disclose details about the availability of dual-core version of its processors.

The two have jockeyed furiously for multicore mindshare since last year. In May, Intel president Paul Otellini pledged that all of Intel's microprocessor development going forward would be multicore. At around the same time, AMD tipped plans to release multicore Opterons and Athlon 64. (In fact, IBM beat both companies to the multicore punch, albeit in a non-X86 device. It rolled out a dual-core Power 4 processor, for use in its RISC servers, in 2001.)

Multicore processors place two or more central processing units on a single semiconductor die. They've come into vogue because, as clock speeds have increased beyond 3.0 GHz, single-CPU processors have become too power hungry, often pushing dissipations beyond 100 W. Dual-core parts can reign in that power consumption. For example, a processor with dual 2.0-GHz cores can deliver performance not all that different from a single-core 3.5-GHz part. More important, the dual-core device holds down power dissipation to a figure closer to that of a standalone 2.0-GHz CPU than a 3.5-GHz chip. So processing throughput effectively doubles for not a whole lot more power.

In its announcement today, Intel said the Pentium processors and chipsets it will deliver in the second quarter will include dual-core versions of its high-end Pentium Extreme Edition processors. These feature Intel's hyperthreading technology, which gives the chip the ability to process four software threads simultaneously.

As for AMD, it's not known specifically what it will talk about next week, though it's possible the announcement will focus on its highly successful Opteron server processor. Earlier this year, AMD demonstrated a dual-core version of Opteron running in a system made by Sun Microsystems.

In addition, dual-core Opterons will fit into the same socket used on current single-core motherboard. This will enable field retrofits of existing systems.