Dual-core Opteron to ship late 2005
Shorty
Manchester, UK Icrontian
AMD made it clear at last week's Athlon 64 launch that multi-core versions of its processors were "inevitable", but the company has now put a date in place for their release.
According to company officials cited by Xbit Labs, dual-core Opterons will ship late 2005. They will be pitched against Intel's first dual-core Xeon, 'Tulsa'.
Speaking at the Athlon 64 launch, AMD said its 64-bit architecture had been designed from the ground-up to support two cores on a single die. The chip's North Bridge components even today can support connections from two cores - dubbed 'CPU 0' and 'CPU 1' in AMD's documentation.
Intel's multi-core readiness isn't known, but it's telling that the company is waiting until it has shipped as yet unreleased product.
Certainly, it will have to wait until its 90nm fabrication process is more mature, and that's probably what's holding AMD back, too. AMD plans to begin using a 65nm process in late 2005 - the same timeframe for the dual-core Opteron - so it may even be waiting for that smaller process. Building the chip on a well-established 90nm process seems more likely, however.
Source :El Reg
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Comments
What a great time to be a geek.
He does
So sweet! Ahh. Now if only hard drives could keep up with this development curve
Ooh, I love it when you talk dirty to me Thrax!