AMD, Intel duel goes quad

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 29 March 2007 09:08

Your IT - Home IT

Intel might be the current CPU champ, but AMD's not throwing in the towel. Both companies are expected to announce significant price cuts next month on their existing processors, ahead of quad-core introductions.

Intel is tipped to trim between 20 and 40 percent from the prices of several Core 2 Duo chips, including the Q6600 quad-core model.

For its part, AMD is expected to take up to 30 percent off the Athlon 64+ series and lesser processors.

AMD plans a midyear introduction of the first products in its quad-core Opteron family, code-named 'Barcelona.' The company claims it will deliver an estimated 40 percent performance advantage over "the competition" as well as improved power management through varying the clock speed of individual cores, and reducing voltage levels to the cores while the memory controller runs at full speed.

Meanwhile, Intel is working on its 'Nehalem' family, designed from the outset for 45nm implementation with the potential for up to eight cores on one chip. In addition, the cores need not be symmetrical - instead, the company will be able produced mixed versions to suit particular applications.

A graphics controller will be included in the same package as the CPU, making it an extremely attractive part for mobile and small form-factor applications.

Nehalem will begin shipping in 2008.