In 2007 we will introduce a true quad-core design with four cores on the die and all the benefits that come with that," Randy Allen, corporate vice president of AMD's server and workstation division, told internetnews.com.
"Current workloads will see an immediate benefit with quad-core and that will only improve as the software industry works on ways to further exploit it."
Allen's reference to a "true quad-core design" is a dig at Intel. Brookwood notes that Intel has been talking about joining what he says are two intelligently-designed dual-cores into a quad-core package.
The two dual-cores communicate via the front side bus: This is in contrast to AMD's architecture, in which the processor connects directly to memory.
"Intel's approach works and is valid. I'm not going to get into whether it's a true quad-core because I don't think that's important," said Brookwood. "But Intel does put more of a load on the front side bus and that means the performance isn't going to be as strong as it could be otherwise."
However, from what I hear it seems that this move by Intel may be a repeat of the first to dual core war that played out when the dual core parts first hit market. Namely Intel won the bragging rights by getting their dual core part to market first. However, to do so they had an inferior CPU design that didn’t allow the two cores to talk directly.What Intel did was basically put two separate cores inside the processor and have them talk via the FSB. Whereas AMD took its time with their last to market dual core CPU, but thoroughly trashed Intel when it came to performance thanks to their much more efficient direct connection for the two cores to communicate over.
From what I am hearing, Intel’s new quad core CPU is taking the same route they took with the first dual core. What we will be seeing is simply two of their current dual core CPUs grafted together and communicating via the FSB. AMD again will take their time and bring to market a quad core CPU that communicates directly between the four cores. If this is accurate, it should again mean that AMD will have the same sort of performance advantage that they had when dual cores were the new tech