AMD To Offer Quad Cores In 2007

KingFishKingFish
edited April 2005 in Science & Tech
Not content to have launched its first dual-core server chip last week, AMD is already chatting up its successor. Two cores not big enough for one socket? Meet the quad-core.
Proving that too much of a good thing is wonderful, AMD released a CPU roadmap showing it cramming four separate Opteron cores onto one die in 2007. Much like the current dual-core design, all cores would be interconnected via HyperTransport lanes, giving phenomenal bandwidth among them. Also like the current design, the memory bus would be shared amongst all cores, decreasing the amount of off-die bandwidth available to each core but keeping latency and contention to a minimum. The current exclusive cache design, where each core gets its own L2 cache, is also expected to be retained.

Given that Opteron was designed from Day One to accommodate multi-core setups, why is AMD waiting until 2007 to deploy them? A quad-core CPU manufactured with current 90 nm semiconductor fabrication technology would be unreasonably large, giving low yields and stratospheric pricing.

AMD intends to use its shiny new Fab36 facility in Dresden, Germany. Fab36 will be AMD's first facility to use 300 mm wafers and 65 nm technology, according to AMD.
Source: GEEK.com

Comments

  • RWBRWB Icrontian
    edited April 2005
    I don't know how multithreaded apps work, but if they are built for a specific number of cores/CPU's at the moment then I hope they start programming software to just handle and take care of however many cores is in a system, be it two or one hundred.
  • drasnordrasnor Starship Operator Hawthorne, CA Icrontian
    edited April 2005
    Multithreaded applications work by spawning child processes for any tasks that make sense to be performed in parallel. Ideally, a parallelized application would spawn oodles of processes and let the OS take care of distributing the load.

    -drasnor :fold:
  • profdlpprofdlp The Holy City Of Westlake, Ohio
    edited April 2005
    Maybe I can fit a Folding Farm in a 2BR apartment. :D
  • mmonninmmonnin Centreville, VA
    edited April 2005
    Well those CPUs would allow you to run 4 clients per CPU. And these will be out for quad and 8-way systems first. Stanford is going to have to up the number of clients per computer past 8.:)
  • CammanCamman NEW! England Icrontian
    edited April 2005
    dual CPU quad-core folding boxes, w00000t :D
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